Astronomy Magazine: Space News, Observing, Planets, Galaxies

Picture of the Day

A pale blue-violet sphere glows softly near the center of a dense starfield, set against faint rust-red clouds of nebulosity. Dark, ropy dust lanes thread through the reddish haze, and a small cluster of bright blue-white stars sits in the lower right corner.

A bubble adrift

Riccardo Maffioli from Albizzate, Varese, Italy

The Soap Bubble Nebula (PN G75.5+1.7 or PN Ju 1), a little-studied planetary nebula in Cygnus near the better-known Crescent Nebula, is the shell cast off by a dying Sun-like star. Its near-perfect sphere, roughly 4′ across was only discovered in 2008; its faintness and position against other emission makes it a challenging target. The astroimager took 22.9 hours of exposure in light-pollution-reduction and dual-narrowband Hα/OIII filters with a 6-inch f/6.1 Ritchey-Chrétien astrograph.

In the Sky

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A photograph of an autumn sunrise showing the Sun as a bright golden-orange disc rising just behind the dark silhouette of a leafy tree, with streaks of orange-lit clouds spread across a deep red-orange sky. Additional silhouetted trees and shrubs line the dark foreground.

Observing

The Sky Today on Tuesday, September 22: The autumnal equinox

What’s Launching This Week

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What’s Launching This Week

China targets two launches as SpaceX takes It easy

Today in the History of Astronomy

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A black-and-white portrait shows a man with wavy, light-colored hair and sideburns standing in three-quarter view against a plain grey studio background. He wears a dark suit jacket, a vest, a white collared shirt, and a wide black bow tie, holding a small rectangular bar horizontally between his fingertips in his raised right hand. Soft key lighting highlights his facial features and shirt front, creating moderate contrast with his dark clothing.

Today in the History of Astronomy

Sept. 22, 1791: The birth of Michael Faraday

More News

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Observing

How to become a variable star observer

Exoplanets

Have astronomers discovered the first moon outside of our solar system?

$A telescopic photograph of a nearly face-on ringed spiral galaxy with a bright, glowing white-yellow core surrounded by multiple faint concentric blue-white spiral rings extending outward. The field is rich with distant background galaxies of various shapes and sizes scattered across the black sky, and a bright foreground star with prominent blue diffraction spikes is visible in the upper right.$

Science