What’s happening to this meteor? It is shedding its outer layers as it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere and heats up. The sudden high temperatures not only cause the bright […]

This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy — or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy, one of the largest […]

Jupiter reaches its 2026 opposition today, January 10. That puts our Solar System’s most massive planet opposite the Sun and near its closest and brightest for viewing from planet Earth. […]

Both Moon and Sun create beautiful ice halos in planet Earth’s sky. In fact, the two brightest celestial beacons are each surrounded by a complex of ice halos in these […]

Similar in size to large, bright spiral galaxies in our neighborhood, IC 342 is a mere 10 million light-years distant toward the long-necked, northern constellation Camelopardalis. A sprawling island universe, […]

Most galaxies have a single nucleus — does this galaxy have four? The strange answer leads astronomers to conclude that the nucleus of the surrounding galaxy is not even visible […]

The Full Moon is the brightest lunar phase, and tonight you can stand in the light of the first Full Moon of 2026. In fact, the Moon’s full phase occurs […]

In 2011, on January 20, NASA’s NanoSail-D2 unfurled a very thin and very reflective 10 square meter sail becoming the first solar sail spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Often considered […]

Cycle 25 solar maximum made 2025 a great year for aurora borealis (or aurora australis) on planet Earth. And the high level of solar activity should extend into 2026. So, […]

What created the Waterfall Nebula? The origin is still being researched. The structure, officially designated Herbig-Haro 222, appears in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion Molecular Cloud […]