Are Saturn’s auroras like Earth’s? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn’s North Pole simultaneously during Cassini’s final orbits around the gas […]

You might not think a close up view of rocket engines producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust would be relaxing, but here it can be. In fact, you can get […]

Colorful and bright, this streaking fireball meteor was captured in a single exposure taken at Purple Mountain (Tsuchinshan) Observatory’s Xuyi Station in 2020, during planet Earth’s annual Perseid meteor shower. […]

Jupiter looks sharp in these two rooftop telescope images. Both were captured last year on November 17 from Singapore, planet Earth, about two weeks after Jupiter’s 2023 opposition. Climbing high […]

Does the Sun return to the same spot on the sky every day?  No.  A more visual answer is an analemma, a composite of sky images taken at the same […]

If you could stand on Mars — what might you see? You might look out over a vast orange landscape covered with rocks under a dusty orange sky, with a […]

This galaxy is unusual for how many stars it seems that you can see. Stars are so abundantly evident in this deep exposure of the spiral galaxy NGC 300 because […]

What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine […]

The large stellar association cataloged as NGC 206 is nestled within the dusty arms of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy along with the galaxy’s pinkish star-forming regions. Also known as M31, […]

How different are these two streaks? The streak on the upper right is Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas showing an impressive dust tail. The comet is a large and dirty iceberg that entered […]