In the mid 19th century, one of the first photographic technologies used to record the lunar surface was the wet-plate collodion process, notably employed by British astronomer Warren De la […]

The South Celestial Pole is easy to spot in star trail images of the southern sky. The extension of Earth’s axis of rotation to the south, it’s at the center […]

Familiar stars of a northern winter’s night shine in this night skyview, taken near Zhangye, Gansu, China and the border with Inner Mongolia. During the early hours of December 17 […]

Yes, but have you seen a movie of Jupiter and Saturn’s Great Conjunction? The featured time-lapse video was composed from a series of images taken from Thailand and shows the […]

What does the Earth look like during a total solar eclipse? It appears dark in the region where people see the eclipse, because that’s where the shadow of the Moon […]

From afar, the whole thing looks like an Eagle. A closer look at the Eagle Nebula, however, shows the bright region is actually a window into the center of a […]

What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine […]

Clouds of glowing hydrogen gas fill this colorful skyscape in the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264, the complex jumble of […]

Orion always seems to come up sideways on northern winter evenings. Those familiar stars of the constellation of the Hunter are caught above the trees in this colorful night skyscape. […]

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is a dominant member of a small galaxy group a mere 60 million light-years away toward the aquatically intimidating constellation Cetus. Seen edge-on, the […]