Ringed ice giant Neptune lies near the center of this sharp near-infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The dim and distant world is the farthest planet from the […]

About 70,000 light-years across, NGC 247 is a spiral galaxy smaller than our Milky Way. Measured to be only 11 million light-years distant it is nearby though. Tilted nearly edge-on […]

Can you see the bat? It haunts this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the […]

Nine days ago, two quite different sky icons were imaged rising together. Specifically, Earth’s Moon shared the eastern sky with the sister stars of the Pleiades cluster, as viewed from […]

Why is there a triangle hovering over the Sun? Although the shape is unusual, the type of structure is not: it is part of an evolving solar prominence. Looping magnetic […]

Why does Saturn appear so big? It doesn’t — what is pictured are foreground clouds on Earth crossing in front of the Moon. The Moon shows a slight crescent phase […]

Galaxies of the NGC 7771 Group are featured in this intriguing skyscape. Some 200 million light-years distant toward the constellation Pegasus, NGC 7771 is the large, edge-on spiral near center, […]

The Moon’s south pole is toward the top left of this detailed telescopic moonscape. Captured on August 23, it looks across the rugged southern lunar highlands. The view’s foreshortened perspective […]

A nearby star factory known as Messier 17 lies some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius. At that distance, this 1.5 degree wide field-of-view would span about 150 […]

When can you see a black hole, a tulip, and a swan all at once? At night — if the timing is right, and if your telescope is pointed in […]