Space News & Blog Articles

How to start out right with a new telescope — a guide to what you need to know, how to set it up, and things you can start finding with it in tonight's sky.

Venus and Mercury glimmer low in the southwest in twilight. The newborn crescent Moon starts the week with them, then visits Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars as it fills out toward full.

The James Webb Space Telescope's early-release image of the Cosmic Cliffs is revealing growth spurts in young stars.

Echoing summer's great arc of planets at dawn, winter presents the full octet again, this time splayed across the evening sky.

When spacetime shivers last only a fraction of a second — as in the case of the massive-black-hole merger GW190521 — astronomers struggle to uncover their origins.

A new deep field from the James Webb Space Telescope shows how galaxies evolved in the early universe.

The Pleiades dipper, the House in the Hyades, Mars high but fading, M31 at the zenith, and a celestial string of holiday lights.

Spectroscopic measurements confirm Webb's distance record, with images revealing galaxies that existed just 330 million years after the Big Bang.

The Perseverance rover on Mars has recorded a dust devil using its microphone, providing unprecedented data about these whirlwinds.

The luminous Geminid meteor shower returns. We also meet a binocular-bright star that may be experiencing Betelgeuse-like convulsions.

That’s one small change in an asteroid’s orbit, one giant leap for humanity.

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight, iSpace’s Hakuto R from Japan, and the United Arab Emirates' Rashid rover are all headed to the Moon after launching aboard a SpaceX rocket.

Redevelopment plans could threaten the site that houses the Holmdel Horn, the instrument responsible for hearing the "hiss" of background radiation from the Big Bang.

Mars, just past opposition, remains bright as it aligns between Aldebaran and Capella. Jupiter shines highest after dusk. And watch for the Geminid meteors.

Sky & Telescope editors report their observations of last night's celestial event: Mars grazing or disappearing behind the Moon.

Long-ago impacts tossed up the floors of an ancient ocean on the Red Planet and carried debris to the landing site of NASA’s Viking 1 lander.

Gamma-ray bursts are generally thought to come in two flavors — supernovae or neutron star mergers. But discoveries are blurring that line.

On the 50th anniversary of Apollo 17, we look back at iconic photos as well as rarely seen images from the mission.

Some of the small missions deployed from Artemis 1 will go on to do great things, while others remain silent.

An abundance of astro images can make up (a little) for cloudy skies and other things in life that may keep us from observing.

A collection of five research studies delve into the atmosphere of exoplanet WASP-39b as astronomers seek to better understand the chemistry of a world beyond the solar system.