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A magazine cover features an illustration of a long, dark-winged rocket ascending into space, leaving a bright trail of exhaust from its glowing orange, honeycombed tail engine. In the background, the curved edge of the Earth glows with a reddish atmosphere beneath a dark sky filled with stars and light clouds. Large text boxes at the top display the magazine title "Collier's" and bold headlines about space exploration.

Human Spaceflight, Space Exploration, Today in the History of Astronomy

The Sky This Week from June 5 to 12: Jupiter and Venus meet

$A curved, icy surface stretches across the lower portion of the frame, with multiple bright jets of vapor and particles erupting upward into a black sky from the moon's fractured southern terrain.$

Alien Life

Scientists used a method from ecology to identify whether icy moons could hold conditions for life

No matter how many Full Moons appear in any given timespan, its color will not actually change to blue. Credit: John Chumack.

Observing, The Moon

What is a Blue Moon? When’s the next one?

Alien Life

Could aliens ever visit Earth?

X-ray and optical composite image of IGR J11014-6103, a pulsar wind nebula, from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. A large, diffuse cloud of magenta/pink X-ray emission dominates the upper left, representing a supernova remnant. To the lower right, a smaller bright green and pink structure shows a pulsar with jets and a curved tail of X-ray emission trailing behind it, indicating rapid motion through space. Background stars are visible throughout. Credit: Chandra X-ray Center (chandra.si.edu).

Science

What does the term ‘supersonic’ mean in astronomy?

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This artist’s conception illustrates one of the most primitive supermassive black holes known (central black dot) at the core of a young, star-rich galaxy. Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have uncovered two of these early objects, dating back to about 13 billion years ago. The monstrous black holes are among the most distant known, and appear to be in the very earliest stages of formation, earlier than any observed so far. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Science

Explore the science of space, from the astrophysics of stars to the ultimate fate of the universe.

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Observing

Learn about upcoming observing events such as eclipses, meteor showers, comets, conjunctions, and more.

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This 2016 Curiosity rover selfie shows the vehicle at the “Okoruso” drilling site on Mount Sharp’s Naukluft Plateau. The Martian scene is a mosaic of images taken with the arm-mounted Mars Hands Lens Imager (MAHLI). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

Space Exploration

Human and robotic missions are helping humanity explore our solar system and beyond.

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June 2026

Untangling the cosmic web
Our planet’s electronic vulnerability
How to observe the night sky under city lights
Capturing the night sky in Kyrgyzstan

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Sky This Week

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Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from June 5 to 12: Jupiter and Venus meet

Sky This Month

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Two bright planets — Venus and Jupiter — shine as close points of light in a deep blue twilight sky above an illuminated city skyline at dusk. The city's skyscrapers, tower, and sprawling lights glow against a gradient sky that fades from deep blue above to lighter blue near the horizon, with low clouds hugging the rooftops.

Observing

June 2026: What’s in the sky this month? Venus and Jupiter have a spectacular conjunction, and the Moon occults Venus

Picture of the Day

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A dense, glowing nebula fills the frame, with tangled clouds of gas and dust in red, orange, green, and blue tones. Near the upper center, a bright bluish-white core and surrounding emerald and lime-green wisps stand out, while darker, finger-like dust lanes and jagged edges cut into the glowing regions. The scene is packed with stars of various sizes and colors scattered across the entire image against a darker, starry background.

The Eagle’s lair

Emmanuel Delgadillo from Jalisco, Mexico

The Eagle Nebula (M16) is well-known for its dense star-forming pillars of gas and dust — including those in the famed Hubble Space Telescope’s “Fingers of Creation” image. It lies roughly 5,000 light-years away in Serpens. This photographer combined over 14 hours of exposure taken with Hα/OIII and SII/OIII dual-band filters and a 7-inch astrograph at f/2.8.