Saturn now rises before midnight in planet Earth’s sky. On July 24, the naked-eye planet was in close conjunction, close on the sky, to a waning gibbous Moon. But from […]

From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. The big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 20 million light-years away, behind a veil of […]

These cosmic clouds have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile starfields of the constellation Cepheus. Called the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023 is not the only nebula to evoke the […]

Our Moon doesn’t really have craters this big. Earth’s Moon, Luna, also doesn’t naturally show this spikey texture, and its colors are more subtle. But this digital creation is based […]

What powers the Crab Nebula? A city-sized magnetized neutron star spinning around 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it is the bright spot in the center of […]

Sometimes the dark dust of interstellar space has an angular elegance. Such is the case toward the far-south constellation of Chamaeleon. Normally too faint to see, dark dust is best […]

This rock structure is not only surreal — it’s real. Perhaps the reason it’s not more famous is that it is smaller than one might guess: the capstone rock overhangs […]

Have you seen a panorama from another world lately? Assembled from high-resolution scans of the original film frames, this one sweeps across the magnificent desolation of the Apollo 11 landing […]

For some, these subtle bands of light and shadow stretched across the sky as the Sun set on July 11. Known as anticrepuscular rays, the bands are formed as a […]

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 […]