This was an unusual night. For one thing, the night sky of August 11 and 12, earlier this week, occurred near the peak of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. Therefore, […]

What’s that on the horizon? When circling the Earth on the International Space Station early last month, astronaut Matthew Dominick saw an unusual type of lightning just beyond the Earth’s […]

What’s happening in the sky above Stonehenge? A meteor shower: specifically, the Perseid meteor shower. A few nights ago, after the sky darkened, many images of meteors from this year’s […]

Messier 20, popularly known as the Trifid Nebula, lies about 5,000 light-years away toward the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. A star forming region in the plane of our galaxy, the […]

Denizens of planet Earth typically watch meteor showers by looking up. But this remarkable view, captured on August 13, 2011 by astronaut Ron Garan, caught a Perseid meteor by looking […]

A Halley-type comet with an orbital period of about 133 years, Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle is recognized as the parent of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. The comet’s last visit to the […]

To some, they look like battlements, here protecting us against the center of the Milky Way. The Three Merlons, also called the Three Peaks of Lavaredo, stand tall today because […]

What makes this storm cloud so colorful? First, the cloud itself is composed of millions of tiny droplets of water and ice. Its bottom is almost completely flat — but […]

That’s no moon. On the ground, that’s the Lars Homestead in Tunisia. And that’s not just any galaxy. That’s the central band of our own Milky Way galaxy. Last, that’s […]

What would it look like to return home from outside our galaxy? Although designed to answer greater questions, data from ESA’s robotic Gaia mission is helping to provide a uniquely […]