Why is it so warm in northern North America? Usually during this time of year — mid-November — temperatures average as much as 30 degrees colder. Europe is not seeing […]

What is so super about tomorrow’s supermoon? Tomorrow, a full moon will occur that appears slightly larger and brighter than usual. The reason is that the Moon’s fully illuminated phase […]

How could that city be upside-down? The city, Chicago, was actually perfectly right-side up. The long shadows it projected onto nearby Lake Michigan near sunset, however, when seen in reflection, […]

A mere 20,000 light-years from the Sun lies NGC 3603, a resident of the nearby Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. NGC 3603 is well known to astronomers […]

Look through the cosmic cloud cataloged as NGC 281 and you might miss the stars of open cluster IC 1590. Still, formed within the nebula that cluster’s young, massive stars […]

Is only one black hole spewing high energy radiation — or two? To help find out, astronomers trained NASA’s Earth-orbiting NuSTAR and Chandra telescopes on Arp 299, the enigmatic colliding […]

What does this aurora look like to you? While braving the cold to watch the skies above northern Canada early one morning in 2013, a most unusual aurora appeared. The […]

Halloween’s origin is ancient and astronomical. Since the fifth century BC, Halloween has been celebrated as a cross-quarter day, a day halfway between an equinox (equal day / equal night) […]

What created these unusually long shadows on Saturn’s rings? The dark shadows — visible near the middle of the image — extend opposite the Sun and, given their length, stem […]

What’s happening near the south pole of Jupiter? Recent images sent back by NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft are showing an interesting conglomeration of swirling clouds and what appear to be […]