Former astronaut Eileen Collins sits at the pilot’s station aboard space shuttle Discovery during a hotfiring procedure on Feb. 2, 1995. via NASA https://ift.tt/moNqWvp

Where have all the dim stars gone? From many places on the Earth including major cities, the night sky has been reduced from a fascinating display of thousands of stars to a diffuse glow through which only a few stars are visible. The featured map indicates the relative amount of light pollution that occurs across […]

Infrared light surges out from the Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 27, in this Aug. 10, 2011, image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. via NASA https://ift.tt/quifgBO

Is this a spiral galaxy? No. Actually, it is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the largest satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The LMC is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy because of its normally chaotic appearance. In this deep and wide exposure, however, the full extent of the LMC becomes visible. Surprisingly, […]

It was visible around the world. The sunset conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in 2012 was visible almost no matter where you lived on Earth. Anyone on the planet with a clear western horizon at sunset could see them. Pictured here in 2012, a creative photographer traveled away from the town lights of Szubin, Poland […]

What are those two bright spots? Planets. A few days ago, the two brightest planets in the night sky passed within a single degree of each other in what is termed a conjunction. Visible just after sunset in much of the world, the two bright spots were Jupiter (left) and Venus (right). The featured image […]

Venus and Jupiter may have caught your attention lately. The impending close conjunction of the two brightest planets visible in clear evening skies has been hard to miss. With Jupiter at the top, starting on February 21 and ending on March 2, their close approach is chronicled daily, left to right, in these panels recorded […]

A NASA ER-2 high-altitude aircraft soars upward at the L.A. county airshow in this image from Mar. 25, 2023. via NASA https://ift.tt/mtiY8xf

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism. That part of the sky is identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts. The new star was visible to the naked-eye for months, and is now thought to be the earliest recorded supernova. This deep telescopic […]

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carries the company’s Dragon spacecraft with NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission members aboard in this five-minute long exposure taken on Thursday, March 2, 2023. via NASA https://ift.tt/US6gxJH