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An artist's illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope floating in space against a starry background with a faint golden-green nebula glow. The boxy, dark-colored spacecraft is shown at an angle, with its sunshield panels extended and its primary mirror aperture visible at the front.

Could aliens spot Earth with the same planet-hunting techniques we use?

Telescopes and Equipment

New astronomy products to fall for this month

Scientists spot a new crater on the Moon

Hubble image of variable star RS Puppis

How to become a variable star observer

Picture of the Day

A straight two-lane road stretches toward a dark horizon, flanked by trees and grassy fields. Above it, the pale, textured band of the Milky Way arcs across the sky with a bright, pinkish glow at its core, while dozens of streaking meteors — white, green, and orange — shoot down through the stars in different directions. A faint yellowish glow lingers along the horizon.

On the Way

Radoslav Zboran, taken from Ejulve, Spain

The center of the Milky Way rises as Perseid meteors streak through the frame above a quiet Spanish road. The photographer blended multiple 10-second exposures at f/2 and ISO 6400 with a modified Canon 6D and a Sigma 35mm lens to build the panorama.

In the Sky

$Photograph of the Double Cluster, showing two dense groupings of blue-white and orange stars side by side against a black sky thickly populated with fainter background stars, with the brightest stars in each cluster showing prominent diffraction spikes.$

The Sky Today on Thursday, October 1: Perseus’ Double Cluster

What’s Launching This Week

Robotic Spaceflight, What’s Launching This Week

Starship reaches orbit on 14th test flight

Today in the History of Astronomy

A black-and-white painted portrait shows a woman with her dark hair styled back in a bun, looking upward as she adjusts a metallic telescope mounted on a table. She wears a long, dark high-collared dress with a white lace collar and white cuffs on her sleeves. Light falls softly from the upper right, highlighting her face, hand, and the metallic sheen of the telescope against a dark, plain background.

Today in the History of Astronomy

Oct. 1, 1847: Miss Mitchell’s Comet

More News

A photoillustration of a thick crescent Moon against a black sky, filling the right side of the frame. The sunlit crescent curves along the left edge, showing gray maria and many craters, and the rest of the Moon's disk is in shadow. Just off the Moon's lower-left limb sits Jupiter, a small tan disk with visible cloud bands, lined up with its four Galilean moons as tiny points of light: from left to right, Ganymede, Jupiter, Io, Callisto, and Europa. The scene shows the jovian system a few minutes before the Moon occults it. Empty black space fills the left side of the image.

Observing, Planets, The Moon, Upcoming Events

See the Moon occult Jupiter October 6

Photograph of Saturn against a dark background, seen nearly edge-on with its ring system stretching horizontally across the globe and casting a thin shadow band on the planet. The pale gold and tan cloud bands are visible, with a bright white storm feature swirling in the planet's southern hemisphere.

October 2026: What’s in the sky this month?

A Voyager 2 spacecraft image of Neptune showing the planet as a sphere with vivid blue and teal atmospheric bands, a large dark storm system visible in the southern hemisphere, and bright white clouds including a prominent high-altitude cloud streak near the center. The planet's limb glows with a subtle golden hue against the black background of space.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from September 25 to October 2: Neptune at opposition

Features, Science

The Michelson-Morley experiment: Finding light’s true nature

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