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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

Science

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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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August 2026

How gravitational waves transformed our universe
Review: Celestron NexImage 20
AI aims for orbit
Finding light’s true nature

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Sky This Week

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A photograph of a total solar eclipse at totality, showing the Moon as a dark disc completely blocking the Sun, surrounded by the softly glowing white solar corona against a black sky. Several small pink solar prominences are visible along the edge of the Moon.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from August 7 to 14: A solar eclipse and shooting stars

Sky This Month

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A side-by-side pair of lunar eclipse images. On the left, a total solar eclipse shows the Moon as a black disc surrounded by the Sun's white corona, with several pink solar prominences visible along the edge. On the right, a total lunar eclipse shows the Moon glowing in deep red and orange hues — a "blood moon" — with a bright sliver of normal white moonlight still visible along the upper right edge.

Observing

August 2026: What’s in the sky this month? Solar and lunar eclipses, plus the Perseid meteors

Picture of the Day

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A close-up view of the Sun's surface shows a swirling, fibrous texture in deep orange and red, resembling flowing fur or fabric. A dark, arching loop of cooler gas curves across the center, and the tiny black silhouette of the space station, with its solar panels and modules visible, sits just to its upper right.

Caught in transit

Tianyao Yang, taken from Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu, China

The International Space Station transits the active Sun, captured Aug. 1 next to sunspot groups AR4498 and AR4500. The imager used software to model the station’s path to ensure it would cross those sunspot regions from the viewing location. The transit lasted 0.58 second, which the imager recorded at 135.3 fps with 0.3-millisecond exposures at a gain of 504 with 4-inch f/7.6 Hα solar telescope and 5x Barlow.