Full Moon Geminids
The dependable annual Geminid meteor shower will be near its peak tonight (December 13/14) and before tomorrow’s dawn. As Earth crosses through the dusty trail of active asteroid 3200 Phaethon […]
The dependable annual Geminid meteor shower will be near its peak tonight (December 13/14) and before tomorrow’s dawn. As Earth crosses through the dusty trail of active asteroid 3200 Phaethon […]
Bright stars, clouds of dust and glowing nebulae decorate this cosmic scene, a skyscape just north of Orion’s belt. Close to the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, the wide […]
What has this supernova left behind? As little as 2,000 years ago, light from a massive stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) first reached planet Earth. The LMC […]
What are those streaks over the horizon? New Starlink satellites reflecting sunlight. SpaceX launched 60 Starlink communication satellites in May and 60 more in November. These satellites and thousands more […]
Everybody sees the Sun. Nobody’s been there. Starting in 2018 though, NASA launched the robotic Parker Solar Probe (PSP) to investigate regions near to the Sun for the first time. […]
Are meteors streaming out from a point in the sky? Yes, in a way. When the Earth crosses a stream of Sun-orbiting meteors, these meteors appear to come from the […]
In time stars trace lines through the night sky on a rotating planet. Taken over two hours or more, these digitally added consecutive exposures were made with a camera and […]
This cosmic vista stretches almost 20 degrees from top to bottom, across the dusty constellation Taurus. It begins at the Pleiades and ends at the Hyades, two star clusters recognized […]
Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo and appears […]
It may appear, at first, like the Galaxy is producing the lightning, but really it’s the Earth. The featured nighttime landscape was taken from a southern tip of the Italian […]