Without our satellite, Earth’s geology, biology, and climate — even human philosophy — would be vastly different.

Venus and Jupiter are the top evening features for your observing run after sunset in May. Jupiter also hosts a handful of exciting double transits — and double shadow transits — involving Europa and ...

The evening sky presents quite a show this month. The bright planets Venus and Jupiter shine prominently in the northwest as the sky darkens. It’s best to look for Venus first. The brilliant planet ...

On May 1, 1949, astronomer Gerard Kuiper spotted a new moon of Neptune while examining photographic plates from McDonald Observatory’s 82-inch telescope. It would be the last moon discovered at that ...

Saturn, rising early in the morning, has now become a bit easier to spot in the predawn sky. About 45 minutes before sunrise on May 1, it has reached an altitude of nearly 4° above the eastern horizon ...

Venus ends the month of April near a pair of 4th-magnitude stars in Taurus the Bull: Kappa (κ) and Upsilon (υ) Tauri. The bright planet now lies to the upper right of 1st-magnitude Aldebaran, the Bull ...

Astronomers have discovered a new member of a rare and mysterious class of solar system objects known as sednoids — a subset of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs) with exceptionally distant, ...

This week, Astronomy magazine Editor Emeritus Dave Eicher invites you to look to the southeast on the night of May 3 to see the Moon rise alongside Antares, the brightest star in Scorpius. Good luck!

Rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere aren’t just affecting climate on Earth — they could also make weather in space more dramatic, says new research. A team led by scientists from the ...

Trained as a Soviet Air Force pilot from the age of 15 and a 1959 graduate of the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, Vladimir Komarov piloted Voshkod 1 in 1964 – the first multi-human-passenger space ...

The countdown has begun. The crew is ready. And barring any last-minute hiccups, four astronauts on Wednesday will begin a journey that sends them farther from Earth than any human has gone before.

Exciting planetary action takes place this month. Venus and Uranus vie for attention and lie close to each other in late April. Jupiter offers a lot to observe through a telescope, particularly events ...