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Astrophotography

Announcing the winners of Astronomy Magazine’s 2026 Astrophotography Contest

Photograph of a full Moon against a black sky, tinted golden-tan. Dark gray lunar maria cover much of the upper and left areas, and bright rayed craters stand out, including a prominent one at lower right.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from October 23 to 30: Gaze at the Full Hunter’s Moon

Observing Basics

Understanding celestial coordinates

Composite photograph of a deep blue night sky above a grove of dark pine and deciduous trees beside a small pond on a grassy, golf-course-like landscape. Nearly a dozen thin green-teal Orionid meteors streak across the sky, most angled diagonally from upper left to lower right. The constellation Orion, including its Belt and the glowing Orion Nebula, appears at left of center. A pale glow of light pollution along the horizon, with a few orange and white lights reflecting on the pond, brightens the sky behind the trees.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from October 16 to 23: The Orionid meteor shower peaks

Photograph of a spiral galaxy tilted diagonally across the frame, with a glowing golden-tan core threaded with brown dust lanes and pink star-forming regions. Blue-white spiral arms and clusters of young stars extend outward from the core toward the upper right and lower left. A bright blue-white star with prominent diffraction spikes sits just below the core, and several other foreground stars with spikes are scattered across the dark background, along with a few small orange background galaxies.

Galaxies, Science

Distant NGC 3137 reveals clues about our own galaxy

Deep-Sky Objects

Autumn observing targets for large telescopes

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?

Human Spaceflight

How Artemis 2’s tech will improve life on Earth

Robotic Spaceflight, Solar System

Newly selected NASA mission will hunt for caves on the Moon

Photograph of the Beehive Cluster (M44) as a loose scattering of blue-white stars with a few orange stars across the lower center of the frame, set against a black sky filled with fainter stars. Mars appears at upper right as a bright, glowing orange-red disk.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from October 9 to 16: Mars passes through the Beehive

Far-infrared telescope PRIMA advances toward 2033 launch

New view of 30 Doradus reveals messy workings