The Sun, along with more than 1,500 other stars, journeyed from the middle of the Milky Way to its current position a few billion years ago.

Look north this evening a couple hours after sunset and you’ll easily spot the large shape of the Big Dipper as it sits upside-down in the sky, appearing to pour from its cup into that of the smaller ...

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 ...

Io transits Jupiter’s broad disk late tonight, beginning at midnight EST. On the East Coast, Jupiter is still 40° high in the west at local midnight, readily visible as the brightest point of light in ...

Asteroid 7 Iris reaches opposition at 1 P.M. EST today. Now shining at 9th magnitude, you can best spot the main-belt world after dark, rising higher in the hours after sunset. By 10 P.M. local time, ...

From Mars, Earth transits the Sun four times in a 284-year cycle. The transits occur in either May or November at intervals of 100.5, 79, 25.5, and 79 years. During these events, Earth and the Moon ...

In 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 ...

It’s often said that nonastronomers recognize three celestial objects: the Moon, the rings of Saturn, and Halley’s Comet. History’s first identified periodic comet, 1P/Halley, returned to the night ...

To many of you, Observable Space — formerly PlaneWave — needs no introduction. Starting as a breakaway from Celestron in southern California in 2006, PlaneWave was founded by Rick Hedrick and Joe ...

A recent story in The Planetary Science Journal reported that scientists at the National Air and Space Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies and colleagues have produced the first global map ...

This composite image — the largest ever produced by the ALMA array in Chile, shows the Central Molecular Zone of gas in the nucleus of the Milky Way. Each color depicts a different molecule: sulphur ...