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Stargazing under city lights

Deep-Sky Objects

Summer observing targets for large telescopes

A misty summer forest scene with golden sunlight streaming through the canopy of large oak trees, illuminating a mossy, rocky streambank beside a shallow, gently flowing river. A lens flare is visible in the lower center of the image.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from June June 19 to 26: The summer solstice

Hubble Space Telescope image of an irregular dwarf galaxy showing bright blue star clusters, pink star-forming regions, and a dusty golden core against a black starfield.

Exotic Objects, Galaxies

Active black holes are more common than we thought

A daytime photograph of a crescent Moon visible against a clear blue sky. A bright point of light — a planet being occulted — is caught just above the Moon's illuminated limb moments before disappearing behind it, with the ghostly outline of the Moon's full disk faintly visible through earthshine.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from June 12 to 19: A daytime occultation of Venus

A large radio antenna dish dominates the left side of the frame, pointing upward against a deep purple night sky dense with stars. A brilliant blue-white star flares brightly in the upper right, surrounded by a soft purple nebular glow. The horizon is dark and flat beneath the antenna.

The real disclosure day: The protocols for announcing extraterrestrial intelligence

A dense web of thin blue-purple filaments spans the entire frame, threading through deep red and maroon voids to converge on a blazing central cluster of orange, yellow, and white gas. Scattered across the field, smaller orange and gold clumps glow at the intersections of the filaments. The overall effect resembles a three-dimensional cosmic spiderweb

Cosmology, Features

Untangling the cosmic web

Four astronauts in bright orange Orion spacesuits pose for an official crew portrait against a muted blue-gray background. Two stand at the back and two sit in front; all hold or rest their hands near their white helmets.

Human Spaceflight

Meet the astronauts flying on Artemis 3

An artist's illustration of the MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars, with the spacecraft positioned in the upper left and the rust-colored Martian surface filling the right side of the frame. The spacecraft features a large circular dish, two pairs of extended solar panels, and a long boom extending toward the planet. A star-scattered deep-space background fills the upper left corner.

NASA fails to reestablish contact, decommissions MAVEN

Telescopes and Equipment

Kickstart summer with these new astronomy products

Side-by-side grayscale comparison of the Moon's two hemispheres. The left image shows the familiar near side of the Moon, featuring large dark volcanic plains called maria that give it a distinctive mottled appearance. The right image shows the far side of the Moon, which lacks significant maria and instead appears more uniformly cratered and bright, with prominent crater ray systems radiating outward from impact sites.

Science, Solar System

Why does one side of the Moon have a lot of craters, while the other does not?

A 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way galaxy stretching horizontally across the frame as a bright, glowing band of stars and dust. The galactic center is visible near the middle, dense with warm orange and brown dust lanes and bright star clusters. The surrounding sky is deep black, dotted with individual stars and a few faint nebulae and satellite galaxies visible in the lower portion of the image.

Cosmology, Galaxies

Giant supercluster discovered hiding behind the Milky Way