Astronomy Magazine: Space News, Observing, Planets, Galaxies

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A promotional graphic on a dark blue starfield background. On the left in gold and white text: "Starmus VIII, The Search for Truth," "First Time in Spain, Artemis II Astronauts," the names Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen, and "October 2026, Tenerife, Canary Islands." On the right, three astronauts in orange spacesuits with helmets removed stand close together, smiling toward the camera, with a NASA patch and name tag visible on the center suit. A row of small sponsor and institutional logos runs along the bottom.

Artemis 2 crew lands at Starmus VII — 15 years after Armstrong, Aldrin, and Leonov launched its lengacy

How Roman will unlock the universe

$A detailed telescopic photograph of a face-on barred spiral galaxy, showing tightly wound blue spiral arms laced with pink star-forming regions surrounding a soft, glowing golden core. Several distant background galaxies are visible scattered across the black field, and a bright foreground star with diffraction spikes is visible to the left.$

Galaxies

Why do bars form in some spiral galaxies, but not in others?

Astrophotography, Telescopes and Equipment

ZWO unveils the Seestar S50 Pro

Picture of the Day

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A galaxy with tightly wound, dusty blue spiral arms surrounds a glowing golden-yellow core, seen face-on against a dark, star-flecked background dotted with a few smaller, fainter galaxies. A bright blue-white star sits just to the left of the galaxy, and an orange star glows near the bottom edge of the frame.

A feathery spiral in Sagittarius

Mike Selby/Warren Keller, taken from El Sauce Observatory, Chile

NGC 6902 is a rarely-imaged face-on spiral galaxy about 130 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Sagittarius. Its outer blue arms are filamentary, winding around a bright, yellow core of older stars. The image was taken with a 17-inch PlaneWave CDK astrograph and LRGB filters.