NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has passed its fine-guidance tests, and its Coronagraph Instrument has captured its first light, two key steps on the way to imaging distant planets.
What's creating this giant hole in space? At first glance the featured image looks like it could be a black hole, ringed by a field of stray moons. It isn't. It's a shadow, Earth's shadow, and the picture behind it... Continue Reading →
A total solar eclipse, the Perseid meteor shower, Venus at its brightest, and a deep partial lunar eclipse all light up the sky this month, according to NASA's August skywatching guide.
In just a few weeks, NASA is set to launch one of the most anticipated observatories in decades. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to lift off no earlier than August 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy... Continue Reading →
Jupiter is a world of superlatives: the fastest spinner, the most magnetically powerful planet, and home to a storm that has raged for over 350 years. Here's a closer look at the giant next door.
If Mercury ever applied for a job, its resume would be short on words and long on extremes. Small, fast, and built to survive conditions that would destroy almost anything else, it's the closest planet to the Sun and, in... Continue Reading →
Today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, credited to astrophotographer David Cowland, is a wide, wispy shell of red-glowing gas known as RCW 86. It's a quiet-looking target, but the story behind it stretches back almost two thousand years and... Continue Reading →
Last night's full moon was easy to miss, and that was rather the point. While supermoons dominate headlines with their oversized glow, May 30th delivered the opposite: a blue micromoon, the farthest, smallest, and dimmest full moon of the year.... Continue Reading →
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for May 22, 2026 stopped me in my tracks. It shows a glowing ring of ionized gas floating in the constellation Cygnus, sculpted over thousands of years by one of the most extreme stars... Continue Reading →