Was this image of the Moon’s surface taken with a microscope? No — it’s a multi-temporal illumination map made with a wide-angle camera. To create it, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter […]

Fainter stars in the zodiacal constellation Capricornus are scattered near the plane of the ecliptic in this field of view. The two brightest ones at center aren’t stars at all […]

Only twenty-five years ago, Comet Hale-Bopp rounded the Sun and offered a dazzling spectacle in planet Earth’s night skies. Digitized from the original astrophoto on 35mm color slide film, this […]

Unlike most entries in Charles Messier’s famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It’s a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust […]

Is Earendel the farthest star yet discovered? This scientific possibility started when the Hubble Space Telescope observed a huge cluster of galaxies. The gravitational lens effect of this cluster was seen […]

On the upper right, dressed in blue, is the Pleiades. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and most easily visible open […]

No, the car was not in danger of being vacuumed into space by the big sky vortex. For one reason, the vortex was really an aurora, and since auroras are […]

This almost otherworldly display of northern lights was captured in clear skies during the early hours of March 31 from 44 degrees north latitude, planet Earth. In a five second […]

The natural filter of a hazy atmosphere offered this recognizable architecture and sunset view on March 27. Dark against the solar disk, large sunspots in solar active regions 2975 and […]