Astronomy Blogs - Sky & Telescope

Here's a quick guide to tell meteors from machines in your wide-field images of the night sky. The post Satellite or Meteor? Dissecting Light Trails in Your Sky Photos appeared first on Sky & Telescope .

Engineers have turned off an instrument that measured the density of charged particles in an effort to keep the aging Voyager 1 operational. The post Voyager 1 Shuts Down Another Instrument appeared first on Sky & Telescope .

NASA has announced that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is all set for a September launch. The post The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Is Ready to Fly appeared first on Sky & Telescope .

Watch Regulus disappear and reappear before your eyes during its last North American occultation in the current cycle. The post See the Moon Hide Regulus, the Stellar Heart of the Lion appeared first on Sky & Telescope .

The Artemis 2 crew set records and provided amazing views — with more to come — as they journeyed around the Moon. It’s been a while since humans have witnessed in person the celestial scenes from deep space. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen have given us some awesome views from their enviable vantage point over the past…

There’s an old saying, to paraphrase Plato (and a number of others), that every king has a slave in his line of ancestry — and every slave, a king. I’d imagine the same holds true for doctors, teachers, and supervillains. So maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I have an astronomer way back in my lineage. Early in March, I was engaged in another astronomy-via-FaceTime session with Dad. With…

If we’re lucky, we’ll soon have bright comets at both dawn and dusk. While Comet PanSTARRS (C/2025 R3) may never achieve the hoped-for splendor of the sungrazer Comet MAPS, at least its future appears more certain. It passes perihelion at a relatively chill 74.6 million km (46.4 million miles) on April 19th, compared to a Sun-scorching 162,000 km (100,700 miles) for the MAPS comet. If they both p…

NASA’s Artemis 2 mission departs, marking a return for humans to cis-lunar space. They’re on their way. After more than a decade’s worth of planning, delays, and revisions, the boosters on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1 rocket roared to life and lifted off from pad LC-39B in Florida on Wednesday, April 1st, at 6:35 p.m. EDT / 10:35 Universal Time, 11 minutes into the two hour launch win…

Astronomers disagree on whether they’ve found evidence that stars don’t make certain sizes of black hole. Scientists expect a gap in the range of masses a black hole can have. Due to the vagaries of nuclear fusion, some goliath stars — we’re talking 100 to 260 times the Sun’s mass — should blow themselves to smithereens, leaving no remnant behind. This stellar annihilation will leave its mark on …

As the comet prepares for its perilous perihelion passage, we look at what to expect. We're all wondering the same thing. How bright will Comet C/2026 A1 MAPS get? Will it become a splendid sight like some of its sungrazing siblings of the past or will it fracture and fade? With perihelion less than three weeks away, a definitive answer is lacking, but we can still speculate. First, let's examine…

We live our lives in a blink of universal time. In the inaugural season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Captain Nahla Ake gives a thoughtful and rousing address to her cadets as their starship circles the fictional Val Nebula. “I’m struck by its very existence,” she says of the nebula. “The incalculable number of atoms that had to converge in this tiny patch of a seemingly infinite universe. Thi…

March opens with a spectacular total lunar eclipse. Our guide will help you make the most of it. We're on a roll! It will be less than a year since the last total lunar eclipse visible from the Americas, and already the next one is upon us. After this one, a deep partial eclipse will occur on August 28th, with 96% of the Moon covered during totality. No complaints here. Lunar eclipses are long, l…

The RAMSES mission to the asteroid Apophis will launch in 2028 to meet the asteroid before its close encounter with Earth. I remember going to an astronomy club meeting way in 2004, back when the asteroid later named 99942 Apophis was discovered. We all had a good laugh at the irony that a potential city-killer asteroid would visit Earth on the far-off date of April 2029 — on Friday the 13th. Fas…

On February 18th, the willowy crescent Moon has a close shave with Mercury, so close that it occults the planet from some U.S. cities. Well before the official start of spring, skywatchers divine the season's arrival in the slant of the crescent Moon at dusk. From fall through early winter, the young Moon keeps low in the southern sky, where bright twilight makes a day-old crescent difficult if n…

Want to see something crazy amazing? Late on February 9th, Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann underwent another of its famous cryovolcanic explosions, causing its brightness to jump magnitudes from approximately 13.5 to 11.5. In a matter of hours, the comet's visual appearance morphed from a faint, diffuse object on the edge of visibility to a tiny, dense cotton ball less than 15″ across. It's now wi…