Astronomy Staff, Author at Astronomy.com

Astrophotography

Announcing the winners of Astronomy Magazine’s 2026 Astrophotography Contest

Illustration depicting a dark, rocky planet filling most of the frame, its surface shadowed on the left and faintly lit along the right edge. A small reddish star glows at lower right, set against a starry background streaked with faint blue nebulosity.

Cosmology, Exoplanets, Science

What can we learn from gravitational lensing?

How do professional astronomers book time on JWST or Hubble?

Satellite photograph of the contiguous United States at night, showing city lights as golden points and clusters against a dark navy landmass and black ocean. The eastern two-thirds of the country glow densely and almost continuously along the coasts and around the Great Lakes, while the western half shows sparser, more isolated clusters of light concentrated along the Pacific coast and scattered through the interior.

How can I reduce my personal contribution to light pollution?

Telescopes and Equipment

New astronomy products to fall for this month

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?

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.

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

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

An artist's illustration of 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object detected passing through the solar system, depicted as a long, thin, reddish-brown elongated rock tumbling through space near a bright glowing sun. A diffuse dust or gas trail streams behind it, and the starry black background of deep space surrounds the scene.

Why aren’t free-floating planets captured when they fly past stars?

A composite photograph showing a lunar analemma — a sequence of Moon images captured at the same time over multiple nights — tracing a graceful figure-eight shaped arc across the night sky above the illuminated skyline of Giza, Egypt, with the three Great Pyramids silhouetted against the city's orange glow. The Moon's phases progress and change in size throughout the sequence, reflecting its varying distance and illumination over the course of the observation period.

Solar System, The Moon

Why doesn’t the moonrise time change by the same amount of time each day?

STARMUS Festival cofounders Sir Brian May and Garik Israelian presented Sir Ridley Scott with the 2026 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication

Astrophotography, Telescopes and Equipment

ZWO unveils the Seestar S50 Pro