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If you’ve got an 11-inch telescope or larger and you live in Southeast Asia, NG-funded astronomers need your help to catch an occultation of Pluto’s mysterious moon Hydra.
With one Pluto occultation on the books, teams spread around the globe are now racing to refine predictions for an event a few days later—the first time they’ve tried using a precursor occultation to pinpoint a second one.
Watch what happens when “the pesky Earth” blots out the view of a sun-watching satellite, and find out why the unusual eclipse could lead to trouble for technophiles.
Astronomers Cathy Olkin and Harold Reitsema arrive on Majuro and start collecting data to prepare for this week’s occultation of Pluto.
Follow along with a NASA expedition, partly funded by Nat Geo, to watch an occultation of Pluto and its moons from a scattering of remote Pacific islands.
Is it a portal ripped through space and time? A beacon for the Green Lantern? Get the scoop on the latest stunner from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
Regardless of whether you like classic Soundgarden, anyone growing up in the 1990s probably recalls the eerily morphed faces of suburban America that made the music video for “Black Hole Sun” such a memorable part of the MTV rotation. Almost 20 years later, videographer Christoph Malin has found his own way to tie this particular…
Today NASA will officially stop trying to contact the beleaguered Mars rover, which went silent in March 2010 after a six-year career on the red planet.
A collection of 70 works opening this week at the National Air and Space Museum shows 50 years of the U.S. space program through artist’s eyes, from Rockwell to Wegman.
From Yellowstone to Svalbard, see some of the gorgeous places on Earth that are helping scientists figure out how life may evolve on other planets.
Combining seven months of study, a time-lapse movie from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows how a star spinning in its grave is churning up the Crab Nebula.
When people talk about finding life among the stars, it’s often a fairy tale that comes to mind. That’s because we on Earth really hope to find a planet like ours in what’s called the Goldilocks zone—a region not too close and not too far from the star, but at just the right distance to…
When NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in February 2010, engineers placed it in what’s called a geosynchronous orbit over Earth. The idea is that the craft circles our planet at the same speed as Earth’s rotation about its axis. To an observer on the planet’s surface, the satellite seems to return to the…
Being cautiously optimistic paid off last night—around 10:45 p.m. local time we got word that we were “go” for RSS rollback. Doused in bug spray, we piled off the bus to stand as close to Endeavour as possible while the servicing structure unfolded. The process itself seems to start in slow motion, with barely perceptible…
It’s almost 10 p.m. local time here at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and crowds of bedraggled press are gathered in the media center waiting for the weather to clear so we can go witness a milestone in human spaceflight. In the distance the space shuttle Endeavour stands at Launch Pad 39A, which glitters with…
Attendees of a Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Wales this week are likely abuzz over a study presented yesterday that says there really was a bright star that appeared the day King Charles II was born in May 1630. Dubbed the royal star, this legendary celestial guest was described as a star shining so bright…
Perhaps because he could no longer fly on the Concorde, Air France passenger Nate Bolt decided to simulate what it would be like to fly from San Francisco to Paris—in just two minutes. In reality, the flight lasted about 11 hours, taking off from California at 3:35 p.m. local time, crossing over Greenland at night,…
The wait is over. At a ceremony today honoring the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden finally revealed which museums around the country are going to get retired shuttles to put on display. Without further adieu, the winners are: Enterprise: Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, New York City…
Right now stargazers have the perfect chance to find an unusual speeding star by remembering this phrase: Follow the arc to Arcturus. The key is the Big Dipper, a familiar grouping of stars that is currently in the northeastern sky in mid-evening. If you draw an imaginary line from the Dipper’s handle, your eye should…
You *must* click to make this full screen. In this jaw-dropping time-lapse video, photographer Randy Halverson has captured the crisp, starry skies over South Dakota in February. According to Halverson, most nights he was out shooting were sub-zero, sometimes with a wind chill of -25 degrees F (-31.6 degrees C). Shooting the scenes involved a…
It might not look like anything special, but this monochromatic landscape represents a historic moment for astronomers: It’s the first picture of Mercury taken from orbit around the tiny planet. NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft snapped the shot at 5:20 a.m. ET today, not quite two weeks after the probe successfully entered orbit. MESSENGER took more than…
by Rachel Kaufman You are likely not reading this blog from Natural Bridges National Monument, the world’s first international dark-sky park. Nor are you probably reading from Arizona Sky Village, one of the darkest places in the continental U.S. In fact, statistics say that you’re reading this blog from a city. And that means you…
by Rachel Kaufman “The story begins two months before the launch of the Phoenix Mars Lander. One year before the landing. It takes ten months to fly at 74,000 mph to arrive on Mars. It’s far. The subject of the story is a Martian photographer. “Don’t call me that,” Peter Smith, the world’s greatest Martian…
In Roman mythology, Mercury was the fleet-footed messenger to the gods. It’s therefore fitting that NASA went to great pains to name the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury MESSENGER. That’s an acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. (Personally, I would have tried to find a way to name the orbiter…
Welcome to the first of a weekly column dedicated to that most ancient form of astronomy: stargazing! Veteran sky-watcher and science writer Andrew Fazekas will be giving us the skinny on what’s hot in the night sky, including when, where, and how to see some amazing cosmic sights from the comfort of your backyard. This…
