August 2006

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The world's best-selling astronomy magazine offers you the most exciting, visually stunning, and timely coverage of the heavens above. Each monthly issue includes expert science reporting, vivid color photography, complete sky coverage, spot-on observing tips, informative telescope reviews, and much more! All this in an easy-to-understand, user-friendly style that's perfect for astronomers at any level.

Features

Unlocking the solar system’s past

By David A. Kring

There’s a treasure trove locked inside meteorites, rare particles older than Earth.

pg. 32

Online extra: Stardust's surprise

By Francis Reddy

NASA's mission to retrieve comet dust found material from the wrong side of the solar system.

Between a rock and a gas giant

By Richard Talcott

Mars and Jupiter bracket a belt of mini-planets where action is the name of the game.

pg. 38

Earth under fire

By Mike D. Reynolds

Our planet’s surface is riddled with craters formed by high-speed cosmic impacts.

pg. 40

Blast from the past

By David A. Kring

Fifty thousand years ago, a multimegaton impact gouged out Arizona’s Meteor Crater.

pg. 46

Online extra: Causes of Earth's mass extinctions

By Liz Kruesi

The Meteor Crater impact event killed off most plant and animal life in the near vicinity, but it was nothing compared to our planet's mass extinctions.

Classic rock

By Michael E. Bakich

Stone meteorites are the most common in space, but they’re tough to find on Earth.

pg. 62

The great interplanetary rock swap

By Bill Cooke

Some meteorites come from the Moon, others from Mars. Here’s how they arrive.

pg. 64

Online extra: Park Forest: a modern L'Aigle

By Bill Cooke

The 2003 shower of meteorites near Chicago was a replay of the event that gave birth to meteorite science.

Heavy metal