A glowing landscape of gas and dust is heated and illuminated by a thriving population of young stars in the LH 95 region of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
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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NASA astronaut and Expedition 75 flight engineer Anil Menon poses in a spacesuit for a portrait at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Read MoreTo be a planet, NASA says an object must be big enough that its gravity has cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit around the Sun. I can understand how something can clear objects close to itself, but how does it clear something 180° away in its orbit? Rebecca SmithWashougal,Continue reading “How do planets clear out objects on the other side of their orbit?”
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Read MoreThe Soviet Union launched Phobos 2 on July 12, 1988, the second of two uncrewed probes designed to study Mars, moons Phobos and Deimos, the Sun, and the interplanetary environment. Each probe was equipped with 25 instruments including high-energy detectors; X-ray and solar photometers; infrared, ultrasound, and gamma-ray spectrometers; and more. Phobos 1 was lostContinue reading “July 12, 1988: Phobos 2 launches”
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Read MoreOn July 11, 1801, French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons made his first comet discovery, c/1801 N1. When he’d began his career in 1789 as a doorkeeper (essentially, a concierge) at Marseille Observatory, the directors had recognized his talents and taught him more about astronomy. That background, combined with his exceptional observational skills and the ability toContinue reading “July 11, 1801: Jean-Louis Pons finds his first comet”
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The waxing gibbous Moon is pictured above Earth from the International Space Station as it orbited 264 miles above a partly cloudy Indian Ocean southeast of Madagascar.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. July 9: Venus stands above Regulus Look north after dark tonight to spot one of the most famous asterisms in the sky: the Big Dipper. Late tonight, it lies to the lower left of the North Star, Polaris, with its cup belowContinue reading “The Sky Today on Friday, July 10: Meet Mizar and Alcor”
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These sulfur crystals were found inside a rock after NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover happened to drive over it and crush it on May 30, 2024, the 4,200th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. July 8: Asteroid Melpomene at opposition Venus passes 1.1° north of Regulus, the brightest star in Leo the Lion, at 10 A.M. EDT. The pair is visible after sunset this evening, when they are still close as they slowly set in theContinue reading “The Sky Today on Thursday, July 9: Venus stands above Regulus”
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This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows Messier 3, a densely packed cluster of stars whose origins may be a merger between globular clusters in the early universe.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. July 7: The Moon, Saturn, and Neptune Asteroid 18 Melpomene reaches opposition at 4 P.M. EDT. Now visible all night long, the 9th-magnitude main-belt world is located in southeastern Aquila, near the Eagle’s border with Scutum. To track the asteroid for yourself,Continue reading “The Sky Today on Wednesday, July 8: Asteroid Melpomene at opposition”
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The Artemis II crew participates in the dedication of the Apollo 14 Moon tree at the Lunar Receiving Park at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. This tree is a second-generation Apollo Moon tree of the loblolly pine species.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. July 6: Catch the sparkling Coma Star Cluster Last Quarter Moon occurs at 3:29 P.M. EDT. The Moon then passes 7° north of Saturn at 6 P.M. EDT. You can catch this pairing before then, visible in the early-morning sky. An hourContinue reading “The Sky Today on Tuesday, July 7: The Moon, Saturn, and Neptune”
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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman leads a flyover featuring his personally owned F-5 Tiger during the Great American State Fair on July 4, 2026, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Read MoreLooking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. July 5: Capture a view of Saturn’s moons About two hours after sunset, the constellation Coma Berenices is still some 40° above the western horizon. It’s a great time to take in the Coma Star Cluster, also called Melotte 111. Spanning 4°,Continue reading “The Sky Today on Monday, July 6: Catch the sparkling Coma Star Cluster”
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Read MoreOn July 4, 1054, a supernova explosion occurred, marking the death of a star thought to be nine to 11 times more massive than our Sun. This event was observed and recorded around the ancient world, including by Japanese, Korean, and Arab astronomers. Anasazi Native American artists may have drawn a pictograph symbolizing the eventContinue reading “July 4, 1054: The Crab Nebula supernova explodes”
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A bright orange sunburst illuminates Earth’s atmosphere during an orbital sunrise in this photograph from the International Space Station as it orbited 264 miles above the Caucasus Mountains.
Read MoreSpace Race pioneer Andriyan Grigoryevich Nikolayev died July 3, 2004, in Cheboksary, Russia. Even among the first group of Soviet cosmonauts selected, he was considered elite, a member of the “Vanguard Six” chosen for the Vostok missions. His career included piloting Vostok 3 in August 1962, which became the first instance of two crewed spacecraftContinue reading “July 3, 2004: The death of Andriyan Nikolayev”
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Read MoreFriday, July 3Although the Moon is still bright, there’s a short window after darkness falls and before moonrise to sneak in some deep-sky viewing. Let’s get a jump on tomorrow’s celebration of U.S. Independence Day with a look at the Fireworks Galaxy (NGC 6946) in Cygnus, which has reached an altitude of more than 40°Continue reading “The Sky This Week from July 3 to 10: Mars and Uranus meet”
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A Katalyst engineer runs tests on LINK while the satellite is inside the Pegasus XL rocket attached to the Stargazer aircraft at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the evening of Tuesday, June 16, 2026.
Read MoreRon Brecher from Guelph, Ontario, Canada Sharpless 2–112 is a glowing cloud of ionized hydrogen roughly 30 light-years across, threaded by dark rifts of dust. It lies about 6,500 light-years away in Cygnus and is energized by the hot, massive O-type star BD+45 3216. The imager took nearly 24½ hours of exposure in the HubbleContinue reading “A stellar nursery in Cygnus”
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the globular cluster NGC 6723, sometimes called the Chandelier Cluster.
Read MoreThe NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially launched the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a 10-year census of the southern sky that astronomers have anticipated for decades. The announcement came June 30, capping a months-long commissioning process that followed the facility’s handover from construction to operations last October. “It is amazing andContinue reading “Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins its Legacy Survey of Space and Time”
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Flight engineer Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) assists flight engineer Chris Williams of NASA as he tries on his spacesuit, testing its comfort and mobility as well as its communications and life support systems inside the International Space Station’s Quest airlock.
Read MoreRocket launches this week On Tuesday, June 30, Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL will air-launch at 6:23 a.m. EDT from the Reagan Test Site in the Marshall Islands for the Swift Boost Mission. The rocket’s payload is the LINK spacecraft, built by Katalyst Space Technologies, which will rendezvous with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — aContinue reading “Swift Boost mission to launch on Tuesday”
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Read MoreOn June 28, 2011, Pluto’s moon Kerberos was discovered by a team using the Hubble Space Telescope, led by senior research scientist Mark Showalter. While the primary goal of the observing program was to identify both potential targets and potential hazards for the then-upcoming New Horizons mission, Kerberos and its fellow moon Styx were alsoContinue reading “June 28, 2011: Kerberos is discovered”
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Read MorePiotr Czerski, taken from Trzonów, Poland Galaxies M81 and M82 lie amid large clouds of galactic cirrus — dust that lies in our own Milky Way Galaxy and is lit by the galaxy’s overall, ambient glow. Around 2° to the west lies the Vulcan Nebula (WPS 46). The imager used a 2.8-inch f/5 scope andContinue reading “The Vulcan’s nest”
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This image by ESA’s (European Space Agency) Euclid (with color added using ground-based images) provides an earlier snapshot of a region of our galaxy that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will repeatedly observe during the upcoming years.
Read MoreIn November 2025, Airbus grounded approximately 6,000 of its A320 family of aircraft after an international flight suddenly lost altitude, leading to an emergency landing and the hospitalization of 15 passengers. In 2003, during a local Belgian election, a candidate received over 4,000 extra votes on a computerized voting machine — more than was physicallyContinue reading “Our planet’s electronic vulnerability”
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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently observed edge-on starburst galaxy Messier 82 (M82), nicknamed the Cigar Galaxy.
Read MoreLuigi La Bella from Melilli, Italy The Squid Nebula (Ou4) is a faint cloud of oxygen about 2,300 light-years away in Cepheus, nested within the red hydrogen glow of the Flying Bat Nebula (Sharpless 2–129). Its prominent double lobes may be an outflow from a central triple star system, HR 8119. The imager took 43⅓Continue reading “Waiting in the wings”
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NASA’s Pegasus barge arrives at the Launch Complex 39 turn basin at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, June 21, 2026.
Read MoreMost amateur astronomers live with light pollution. When a free schedule, the New Moon, and the ability to travel to a dark site align, you have a night to remember. But like finding a valuable old coin in your change, such nights are the exception, not the rule. However, there’s no need to consider the restContinue reading “Stargazing under city lights”
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The Moon’s rocky, uneven, and otherworldly surface features are highlighted by the terminator – the difference between light and darkness.
Read MoreChris Schur, taken from Payson, Arizona In 1983, NASA’s pioneering Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) imaged the sky and found dust trails littered throughout the solar system. The cause turned out to be comets, which leave trails of dust that build up in their orbit. The dust trail of 10P/Tempel (also known as Comet Tempel 2)Continue reading “Comet Tempel 2’s dust trail”
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Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers may have found a supernova remnant in an intriguing neighborhood in the middle of our galaxy.
Read MoreRocket launches this week Tonight, Monday, June 22, according to tracking from Next Spaceflight, The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) plans to launch a Long March 7A rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Site located in the South China Sea on the island of Hainan at 10:10 p.m. EDT. The payload has notContinue reading “SpaceX tests new vehicle, Swift gets a lift”
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Read MoreStonehenge, the infamous stone circle on Salisbury Plain, U.K., dates to around 2500 B.C.E. The monument is aligned so that if you are standing at the center of the ring on the summer soltice (which can be June 20, 21, or 22), the Sun rises over the Heel Stone; solstice celebrations are believed to haveContinue reading “June 21, ca. 2500 BCE: Summering at Stonehenge”
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Read MoreOn June 20, 1943, Pingualuit Crater (formerly known as Chubb Crater and as the New Quebec Crater) was first photographed by a U.S. Army Air Force crew during a meterological flight over northern Quebec. Formed approximately 1.4 million years ago by a meteorite impact, the 2.1-mile-wide (3.4 kilometers) crater has an unusually circular shape resultingContinue reading “June 20, 1955: Pingualuit Crater is discovered”
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Read MoreOn June 19, 2004, at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, astronomers Roy Tucker, David Tholen, and Fabrizio Bernardi discovered Asteroid Apophis. This Near-Earth Object (NEO), approximately 1,099 to 1,230 feet (335 to 375 meters) wide, reached the highest ever rating of level 4 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale,Continue reading “June 19, 2004: Astroid Apophis is discovered”
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This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month shows the giant molecular cloud Orion A, an area of the sky replete with star-forming clouds.
Read MoreWe’re used to a lot of different natural things falling out of the sky. These can include snow, rain, and sometimes even frogs (yes, really). All of these relate to weather phenomena. Far more exotic things fall from the sky that are not related to weather. Earth is pelted by about 14 tons of micrometeoritesContinue reading “A meteorite impact may have once rained gold on Western Australia – new study”
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The wait is almost over. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is just weeks, maybe even just days, away from officially beginning its landmark 10-year sky survey, according to officials at the 248th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Pasadena this week. “A lot of people in the community are waiting for that moment for theContinue reading “Vera C. Rubin Observatory days away from launching decade-long sky survey”
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Read MoreMassimo Di Fusco, taken via Chilescope NGC 6727 is a reflection nebula and star-forming region in Corona Australis, part of the larger Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. It is accompanied in this image by globular cluster NGC 6723, sometimes called the Chandelier Cluster. This wide-field portrait combines 54 minutes of RGB exposure with a 20-inch f/3.8Continue reading “A glob and a stellar nursery”
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A period of unsettled weather brought scattered showers and thunderstorms to California’s Bay Area on May 27, 2026. That afternoon, a break in the clouds left downtown San Francisco and nearby communities beneath mostly cloud-free skies, allowing an astronaut aboard the International Space Station to take this photograph.
Read MoreAstronomers have created a comprehensive census of active galactic nuclei (AGN) — galaxies powered by a feeding central black hole. The new census, led by data pipeline developer Mugdha Polimera at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, began while she was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,Continue reading “Active black holes are more common than we thought”
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Read MoreOn June 14, 1949, a rhesus monkey named Albert II was launched into space aboard a V-2 rocket from White Sands, New Mexico. Prior to Albert II, animals including fruit flies, mice, and another monkey (Albert I) had been launched in rocket and balloon flights as part of American space biology research, but Albert II’sContinue reading “June 14, 1949: The first mammal in space”
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Read MorePioneer 10 holds the titles for many “firsts”: It was NASA’s first mission to the outer planets, the first spacecraft to fly beyond Mars, the first to traverse the asteroid belt, and the first to fly past Jupiter. It was also the first spacecraft placed on a trajectory to escape the solar system into interstellarContinue reading “June 13, 1983: Pioneer 10 leaves solar system”
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