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Robotic Spaceflight, Solar System

The Sky This Week from July 10 to 17: The Moon and Venus share Leo

$A James Webb Space Telescope deep field image showing hundreds of distant galaxies scattered across a black background in a range of shapes — spirals, ellipticals, and elongated streaks — in colors from white and blue to orange and red. A large, detailed barred spiral galaxy with a bright white core and faint blue spiral arms dominates the center-left of the frame. Several foreground stars display the distinctive six-pointed diffraction spikes characteristic of JWST imagery.$

Cosmology, Stars

JWST studies a supernova near the dawn of time

A wide-angle night sky photograph showing a glowing, diffuse white cloud created by a rocket fuel dump, billowing against a deep blue starry sky. A bright streak of light is visible within the expanding plume. Silhouetted trees and a hillside are visible along the bottom, and the sky fades to a lighter blue near the horizon.

Observing

What’s that in the sky?

Observing

From the Editor, July 2026: See it for yourself

A large planet occupies the upper right of the frame, its surface swirling with bright orange, yellow, and deep red clouds on its sunlit side, fading to dark blue-black on its shadowed edge. Below and to the left, a bright white glow from a nearby star washes out part of the lower frame, set against a dark brown sky scattered with faint stars.

Exoplanets

JWST reveals Roasted Planet’s extreme heat

A gold-foil-wrapped satellite with two long rectangular solar panels extending from either side sits at the center of the frame, angled slightly toward the viewer. Small dark instruments and antennas cluster on its upper surface, and the spacecraft is set against a dense, glowing orange-brown starfield with a patch of pink and red nebulosity in the upper left.

Robotic Spaceflight

NASA launches Swift Boost mission to rescue space telescope

A size comparison illustration showing Earth and the Moon side by side against a black background. Earth appears on the left, showing the Americas, swirling cloud cover, and blue oceans, while the gray, crater-marked Moon is shown to the right at roughly one-quarter of Earth's diameter, accurately reflecting their relative sizes.

Solar System

How is the Moon 1% of Earth’s mass, but its gravity is 17% of Earth’s?

Night sky photograph taken through out-of-focus tree branches, which appear as blurred yellow-green shapes in the foreground. Several faint stars are visible in the deep blue sky, with one noticeably brighter point of light near the center of the frame.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from July 3 to 10: Mars and Uranus meet

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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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July 2026

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Sky This Week

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Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from July 10 to 17: The Moon and Venus share Leo

Sky This Month

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Photograph showing the close conjunction of bright Venus with the star Regulus in Leo at dawn on October 3, 2020.

Observing

July 2026: What’s in the sky this month? Venus and Jupiter are visible in the evening, plus a conjunction of Mars and Uranus before dawn

Picture of the Day

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A dark, twisting column of dust with glowing pink edges curls up from the lower part of the frame toward a small, bright knot near the center. It sits amid vast clouds of deep red and dusky blue-gray gas, sprinkled with hundreds of stars across the field.

A dusty trunk

Mark Killion, taken from Beryl, Utah

The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula (IC 1396A) is a dark, dense column of gas and dust about 2,400 light-years away in Cepheus, part of the larger IC 1396 emission region. The feature is being sculpted by radiation and winds from a nearby massive star, which ionizes the bright rim of the feature. The imager collected 21.6 hours of exposure through broadband and dual-band Hα/OIII filters with a 5-inch f/5 refractor and one-shot-color camera.