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.

The distant ice giant Uranus is located in Taurus right now, not far from the famous (and easy-to-find) Pleiades star cluster, cataloged as M45. Tonight, the planet also sits a short distance due ...

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 ...

French astronomer Charles Messier did not intend to be remembered for his discoveries of galaxies, nebulae, and stars clusters when he looked to the sky in the 1750s. Dubbed the “Ferret of Comets” by ...

With 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 ...

Sixty-five years ago, the USSR shocked the world by sending the first robotic emissary from Earth to the Moon. The September 1959 impact of Luna 2 on northeastern Mare Imbrium was a stunning ...

Look north this evening for Ursa Major the Great Bear, whose back half is best known as the Big Dipper. The two stars on the far end of the cup from the handle are called the Pointer Stars: These are ...

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 ...

French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier was a tutor and an assistant at the Paris Observatory when the director, François Arago, asked him to investigate irregularities in Uranus’ orbit. Using extensive, ...

One of the most enduring mysteries in astronomy may have just been solved — and sorry folks, it’s not aliens. In a paper posted last month to the arXiv preprint server, a team of astronomers report ...

On Oct. 10, 1846, William Lassell peered through his 20-foot reflector in Liverpool, England. Lassell was a self-funded amateur astronomer who had made a fortune as a brewer, and he’d built his own ...

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 ...