Astronomy Magazine: Space News, Observing, Planets, Galaxies

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Rubin spots possible dwarf planet

Announcing the winners of Astronomy Magazine’s 2026 Astrophotography Contest

$Illustration of a reddish, cratered Mars with white patches of frost, seen as a crescent-lit globe. A fractured, rocky moon breaks apart in the foreground, scattering boulders and fragments that stretch into a tan, dusty ring band across the planet against a starry black sky.$

Solar System

Mars’ moon Phobos is destined to become a ring

Solar System

The weird science behind Mars’ weirdest cloud

Picture of the Day

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A long, diagonal ribbon of glowing gas stretches across a dark, star-flecked sky, bright orange-red along its upper edge and fading into pale blue-green toward the bottom. A single bright white star sits near the cloud's lower edge, with countless fainter stars scattered through the background.

California gleaming

Andrei Pleskatsevich from Minsk, Belarus

The California Nebula (NGC 1499), is a roughly 2.5°-long cloud of glowing hydrogen gas in Perseus between 1,000 and 1,500 light-years away, lit by ultraviolet light from the nearby star Xi Persei. The imager collected 8⅓ hours of exposure through a 3-inch f/4.5 refractor with a quad-band filter and one-shot color camera.