What’s up in the sky this winter? The featured graphic gives a few highlights for Earth’s northern hemisphere. Viewed as a clock face centered at the bottom, early winter sky […]

This composition in stardust covers over 8 degrees on the northern sky. The mosaicked field of view is west of the familiar Pleiades star cluster, toward the zodiacal constellation Aries […]

December’s Full Moon phase occurred near perigee, the closest point in its orbit around our fair planet. Big and bright, the fully illuminated lunar disk sets over rugged mountains in […]

As seen from planet Earth, all the lunar and solar eclipses of 2017 are represented at the same scale in these four panels. The year’s celestial shadow play was followed […]

What’s happening on the horizon? The horizon itself, past a spinach field in Guatemala, shows not only trees but a large volcano: the Volcán de Fuego (Volcano of Fire). The […]

Many bright nebulae and star clusters in planet Earth’s sky are associated with the name of astronomer Charles Messier, from his famous 18th century catalog. His name is also given […]

Fans of our fair planet might recognize the outlines of these cosmic clouds. On the left, bright emission outlined by dark, obscuring dust lanes seems to trace a continental shape, […]

The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in […]

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense […]

Some storms on Jupiter are quite complex. The swirling storm was captured late last month by the NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft currently orbiting the Solar System’s largest planet. The featured […]