Two powerful instruments of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope joined forces to create this scenic galaxy view. This spiral galaxy is named NGC 5134, and it’s located 65 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
Read MoreIn March of 1989, a highly active sunspot region released multiple extreme solar flares, including an X4.5 flare on March 10 and a M7.3 flare on March 12. Solar flares are ranked as B, C, M, and X class, with B being the weakest and X the strongest. Within B, C, and M classes, flareContinue reading “March 13, 1989: Quebec goes dark”
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In Euclid’s wide, near-infrared, and visible light view, the arcs and filaments of the nebula’s bright central region are situated within a halo of colorful fragments of gas zooming away from the star. This ring was ejected from the star at an earlier stage, before the main nebula at the center formed. Hubble captures the very core of the billowing gas with high-resolution visible-light images, adding extra detail in the center of this image. The whole nebula stands out against a backdrop teeming with distant galaxies, demonstrating how local astrophysical beauty and the farthest reaches of the cosmos can be seen together in modern astronomical surveys. Together, these missions provide a rich and complementary view of NGC 6543 — revealing the delicate interplay between stellar end-of-life processes and the vast cosmic tapestry beyond.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. March 11: Time to spot the zodiacal light Europa transits Jupiter this evening, beginning shortly before 10 P.M. EDT. A few hours later, the small moon’s shadow follows it across as a dark blot on the cloud tops. Early in the evening,Continue reading “The Sky Today on Thursday, March 12: Europa and its shadow cross Jupiter”
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This impact crater, as seen by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2015, appeared relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta.
Read MoreEmil Andronic from Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, U.K. Cederblad 51 is a blue reflection nebula embedded within the red emission nebula Sharpless 2–264 in Orion — part of a complex of nebulosity near the hunter’s “head.” This portrait combines 69 hours 15 minutes of HαLRGB data gathered between Sept. 9 and Dec. 19, 2025, using twinContinue reading “Tangled up in red”
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Read MoreMassimo Di Fusco, taken from Ferrara, Italy NGC 2403 is a spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis that bears a strong resemblance to a nearby galaxy — the Triangulum, or M33. Both are rich with bright regions of vigorous star formation. NGC 2403 (also cataloged as Caldwell 7) lies about 8 million light-years away in the M81Continue reading “A Triangulum lookalike”
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A brain-new image from Webb! What looks like a brain (complete with what appear as left and right hemispheres) is actually a dying star blowing off a shell of gas, and within that shell, a cloud of various gases.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. March 8: Spiral galaxy NGC 2541 The Galilean moon Callisto disappears behind Jupiter in an occultation early this morning. The catch is that the event is only visible from the western half of the U.S., but observers farther east can still watchContinue reading “The Sky Today on Monday, March 9: Callisto’s disappearing act”
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Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. March 7: Venus meets Saturn Daylight saving time begins this morning at 2 A.M. local time. For regions that observe DST, clocks will “spring forward” from 2 A.M. standard time to 3 A.M. daylight time, meaning the Sun will rise and setContinue reading “The Sky Today on Sunday, March 8: Spiral galaxy NGC 2541”
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Weekends on the International Space Station are for housecleaning and haircuts. NASA astronaut Jessica Meir trims the hair of fellow NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, both Expedition 74 flight engineers, using an electric razor attached to a vacuum that collects loose clippings to keep the station’s atmosphere clean in microgravity.
Read MoreA team of scientists has confirmed that the nearby star GJ 887 hosts at least four planets, one of which could be a habitable world — the second closest to our own solar system. M dwarfs are the most prevalent stars in our galaxy and are some of the best targets for hunting exoplanets. TheirContinue reading “Astronomers confirm potentially habitable exoplanet in the solar neighborhood”
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Read MoreSky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, March 6With no Moon in the early-evening sky, let’s chase down a classic deep-sky object tonight: M1, the first entry in Charles Messier’s list of “not comets” and also known as the Crab Nebula. This smudge of gas and dust left over fromContinue reading “The Sky This Week from March 6 to 13: The Moon and Antares”
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A total lunar eclipse rises over New Orleans, home of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, in the early morning hours of Tuesday, March 3. A lunar eclipse occurs when Earth passes directly between the Sun and Moon, casting a huge shadow across the Moon’s surface. The Moon appears dark red or orange as the Sun’s light filters through Earth’s atmosphere.
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For the first time, a much younger version of the Sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy, by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Read MoreFebruary 24 was the date a new information pipeline began for astronomers around the world. Their computers received a deluge of cosmic notifications — 800,000 alerts about new asteroids, supernovae, and other noteworthy changes in the night sky. The discoveries were made by the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in ChileContinue reading “Rubin Observatory is rocking”
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Off the coast of California, NASA’s Artemis Landing and Recovery team and the Department of War that will work together to retrieve the Artemis II crew and Orion spacecraft following their return to Earth and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean are performing a final simulation of their activities, called a just-in-time training, at sea on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. During the training, teams use the Crew Module Test Article, a full-scale mockup of the Orion spacecraft, to simulate as close as possible the conditions they can expect to encounter during splashdown of the Artemis II mission.
Read MoreEarly this morning, I watched the total eclipse of the Moon from my observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Yesterday (Monday, March 2) was mostly clear with a cerulean blue sky throughout, a high temperature near 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), and just a bit of a breeze, so I had high hopes that I’d see the event. MyContinue reading “The March 3 total lunar eclipse: a recap”
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The sun’s glint beams off a partly cloudy Atlantic Ocean just after sunrise as the International Space Station orbited 263 miles above.
Read MoreHow is it that galaxies merge and collide but the universe is expanding and everything is moving away from everything else? Justin HammersleySterling Heights, Michigan Whether or not galaxies merge depends on how strong the gravitational attraction is between the galaxies and whether the universe’s expansion is more powerful than gravity. Gravity affects everything inContinue reading “How can galaxies merge if the everything in the universe is moving apart?”
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Read MoreBeginning at the dawn of the Space Age in the late 1950s, the Soviets worked to design and construct a series of Venus probes. And for almost 30 years, they built and flew the interplanetary spacecraft as part of the Venera program — carrying out rather impressive feats, even by today’s standards. Venera 1, theContinue reading “March 1, 1966: Venera 3 crashes into Venus”
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Read MoreOn Feb. 28, 1997, the Gamma Ray Burst Monitor on the Italian-Dutch Satellite BeppoSAX detected GRB 970228. The gamma ray burst (GRB) lasted about 80 seconds. BeppoSAX’s rapid determination of its position allowed multiple other observatories to quickly begin campaigns in multiple wavelengths. On March 27, the Hubble Space Telescope began observing GRB 970228 and,Continue reading “Feb. 28, 1997: GRB 970228 bursts on the scene”
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The Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project aims to demonstrate the carbothermal reduction of lunar regolith to produce oxygen on the Moon’s South Pole. For this test, the team integrated the solar concentrator, mirrors, and software and confirmed the production of carbon monoxide.
Read MoreNASA is reshuffling the Artemis program’s mission architecture, adding an intermediate test flight in 2027 and committing to annual lunar landings starting in 2028 as the agency pushes to accelerate its return to the Moon. Artemis 2 is currently set to launch in April, assuming engineers can resolve a helium flow issue that cropped upContinue reading “NASA overhauls Artemis, adds second mission before first lunar landing”
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NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren takes a selfie with the people behind “Project Hail Mary” and the audience during a panel about the movie at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Feb. 25, 2026.
Read MoreBorn Feb. 26, 1842, in France, Camille Flammarion started early on what would be a long literary and scientific career: At only 16 years old, he wrote a 500-page tome entitled Cosmologie Universelle. The same year, Flammarion obtained a position as an assistant at the Paris Observatory and after a five-year break in his careerContinue reading “Feb. 26, 1842: The birth of Camille Flammarion”
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NASA astronaut and SpaceX Crew-12 Pilot Jack Hathaway enters the International Space Station after docking aboard the Dragon spacecraft to join Expedition 74 and begin a long-duration microgravity research mission.
Read MoreThe center of the Milky Way is an extreme place. In addition to housing our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, it also contains a 700-light-year-wide region of dense gas called the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). This CMZ holds nearly 80 percent of all the cold, dense gas in the galaxy — the key ingredient for formingContinue reading “Largest ALMA image ever shows cold gas in our galactic center”
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For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, uncovering how temperature and charged particles vary with height across the planet.
Read MoreTektites are natural glasses formed by the high-energy impact of large meteorites against Earth’s surface. Recently, a team of researchers found a new strewn field of them in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Because of the location of the find, the tektites have been named geraisites. The discovery was described in an article published in theContinue reading “A new field of tektites discovered in Brazil”
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This high-resolution still image is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on February 18, 2021.
Read MoreMission highlight: ‘That’s Not A Knife’ Rocket Lab is targeting Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 3:00 p.m. EST for the launch of its HASTE (Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron) rocket from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, according to Next Spaceflight. The suborbital mission, dubbed “That’s Not A Knife,” will carry DART AEContinue reading “Rocket Lab to launch Australian scramjet on first hypersonic flight”
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Read MoreAfter moving off an early February launch window for Artemis 2 — a four-person sojourn around the moon and back — NASA on Friday said it hopes to launch the mission on March 6. Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said that a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for Artemis 2 “wentContinue reading “NASA now targeting March 6 for Artemis 2 Moon mission”
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Read MoreJohn Vermette, taken from Starfront Observatories near Brady, Texas The young star cluster IC 348 lies embedded in the Perseus molecular cloud near the emission nebula LBN 749, lies roughly 1,000 light-years away in Perseus and hosts newborn stars swaddled in dust and gas. The imager collected 16 hours of exposure with a 4-inch scopeContinue reading “A dusty nursery”
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NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen take off on a T-38 training flight from Ellington Field on Feb. 11, 2026, as a waning crescent Moon hovers above.
Read MoreIn the northwest section of Ursa Major the Great Bear sits the magnificent spiral galaxy M81 (NGC 3031). At magnitude 6.9, this ranks as one of the sky’s brightest galaxies. You’ll find it 2° east-southeast of the magnitude 4.5 star 24 Ursae Majoris. German astronomer and celestial cartographer Johann Elert Bode discovered this object, and nearbyContinue reading “Michael’s Miscellany: Observe Bode’s Galaxy”
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This image of lysozyme crystals grown aboard the International Space Station was taken after the crystals returned to Earth in April 2024. Lysozyme is a protein found in bodily fluids like tears, saliva, and milk. It is used as a control compound to demonstrate well-formed crystals.
Read MoreAmateur astronomers, take note: A wonderful celestial event known as a total lunar eclipse will occur in the skies above North America during the morning hours of Monday, March 3. Lunar eclipses happen when the Sun, Earth, and the Moon align, in that order. When this alignment is precise, Earth’s shadow falls upon the Moon, obscuring itContinue reading “How to observe the March 3 total lunar eclipse”
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Fishing boats illuminate the Arabian Sea along India’s west coast with green lights designed to attract squid, shrimp, sardines, and mackerel in this nighttime photograph from the International Space Station, orbiting 259 miles above Earth. At lower right, the city lights of Hyderabad—renowned for its historic diamond and pearl trade—stretch westward toward the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, home to over 26 million people and the heart of Bollywood.
Read MoreFrom 1905 until his death in 1916, Percival Lowell searched for a ninth planet, which he called Planet X. Lowell had predicted the planet based on irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. In 1929, Lowell Observatory Director V.M. Slipher hired self-taught astronomer Clyde Tombaugh to resume Lowell’s search for the planet. Tombaugh captured long-exposure photosContinue reading “Feb 18, 1930: Discovery of Pluto”
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Northern Japan, especially the island of Hokkaido, is home to some of the snowiest cities in the world. Sapporo, the island’s largest city and host of an annual snow festival, typically sees more than 140 days of snowfall, with nearly 6 meters (20 feet) accumulating on average each year.
Read MoreThe phenomenon of a Full Moon arises when our planet, Earth, is precisely sandwiched between the Sun and the Moon. This alignment ensures the entire side of the Moon that faces us gleams under sunlight. Thanks to the Moon’s orbit around Earth, the angle of sunlight hitting the lunar surface and being reflected back toContinue reading “2026 Full Moon calendar: When to see the Full Moon and phases”
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Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. February 15: Saturn and Neptune stand close Now roughly 7th magnitude, Comet C/2024 E1 (Wierzchoś) is readily visible in the Northern Hemisphere once more. With New Moon less than a day away, it’s the perfect time to check in on this cometaryContinue reading “The Sky Today on Monday, February 16: Catch Comet Wierzchoś in twilight”
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Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. February 14: A Valentine’s Heart (Nebula) This evening, Saturn passes 0.9° south of Neptune at 11 P.M. EST. The two planets stand together in Pisces, located in the west after sunset. An hour after the Sun goes down, the pair is stillContinue reading “The Sky Today on Sunday, February 15: Saturn and Neptune stand close”
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev onboard, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission is the twelfth crew rotation mission of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. Meir, Hathaway, Adenot, and Fedyaev launched at 5:15 a.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin a mission aboard the orbital outpost.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. February 13: Catch the zodiacal light This Valentine’s Day, the sky is serving up the perfect target: the Heart Nebula (IC 1805) in Cassiopeia the Queen. Best seen in the early evening after dark, there’s no Moon in the sky to interfereContinue reading “The Sky Today on Saturday, February 14: A Valentine’s Heart (Nebula)”
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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals the clearest view yet of the Egg Nebula. This structure of gas and dust was created by a dying, Sun-like star. These newest observations were taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. February 12: Asteroid Nysa approaches a star This dark, moonless Friday the 13th evening is the perfect time to head out after dark and try to catch a glimpse of the zodiacal light. This ethereal, cone-shaped glow is actually the reflected lightContinue reading “The Sky Today on Friday, February 13: Catch the zodiacal light”
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Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. February 11: Ganymede’s shadow, Io cross Jupiter Asteroid 44 Nysa may be just past opposition, but it’s still placed perfectly for evening viewing in Cancer the Crab. Wait until a few hours after sunset, when Cancer is high in the eastern sky,Continue reading “The Sky Today on Thursday, February 12: Asteroid Nysa approaches a star”
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From left, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 crew members – Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot – pose next to their mission insignia inside the Astronaut Crew Quarters in the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, Feb. 9, 2026.
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