StarDate

Moon and Companions

The Moon anchors a prominent triangle in tomorrow’s early-morning sky. The pattern is well up in the east at first light. The stars Pollux and Castor – the twins of Gemin

Moon and Mars

Some of the most imposing features on Mars are its giant volcanoes. The largest is Olympus Mons. It’s more than 13 miles high, and covers an area as big as New Mexico. It

Red and Black

Little Red Dots might be like Tootsie Roll Pops: colorful on the outside, dark on the inside. They may consist of a glowing cloud of gas and dust encircling a supermassiv

Third-Generation

In the past decade, astronomers have “heard” almost 400 mergers between black holes. The signals were carried by gravitational waves – tiny ripples in spacetime. They’ve

Moon and Pleiades

The Moon charges at the Pleiades late tonight. As seen from most of the United States, it will pass especially close to the star cluster – either just skimming its edge o

Roman Telescope

The center of the Milky Way Galaxy is packed with treasures: stars, dead stars, gas clouds, and lots of planets. And a new space telescope will spend a lot of its time so

Venus and Spica

The planet Venus and the star Spica huddle close the next few evenings. They’re quite low in the west-southwest in early twilight. Venus is the brilliant “evening star.”

Moon and Saturn

If you look carefully at pictures of Saturn, you’ll probably notice something odd about the planet – it looks mashed down, like a beachball that a child is sitting on. Th

Going Dark

The world’s top tennis players will spend many hours under the lights over the next two weeks. And thanks to some changes made a couple of years ago, almost all of the li

Celestial Sea

The Moon will ply the dark waters of the celestial sea the next few nights – a large region of sky that’s populated by constellations related to water. Tonight, the Moon

More Lunar Eclipse

A season comes to an end today. It has nothing to do with falling leaves, changing weather, or even big-time sports. Instead, it’s a season of eclipses. It didn’t last lo

Lunar Eclipse

The full Moon won’t look quite itself for part of tomorrow night. That’s because it’ll pass through Earth’s long shadow, creating a partial eclipse. At its peak, the shad

Fast-Growing Planets

As the roster of known planets in other star systems grows, astronomers learn a lot more about planets and stars in general. One key finding is that almost all stars are

Hamal

Of the thousands of planets that have been discovered in other star systems, only a few orbit stars that are easy to see with the eye alone. Most of the stars are so fain

Jupiter Rising

Jupiter is climbing away from the Sun, moving a little higher into the dawn sky day by day. Right now, it’s quite low in the east as twilight paints the sky. But it’s als

Changing Signs

The Sun narrowly skirts by the heart of the lion today and tomorrow – the star Regulus. At their closest, they’ll be separated by just a fraction of a degree. After that,

Cloudy Crossing

The space around our solar system is cloudy. Astronomers have mapped 15 individual clouds within a few hundred light-years. The clouds are moving in different directions,