Sometimes, the sky itself seems to smile. A few days ago, visible over much of the world, an unusual superposition of our Moon with the planets Venus and Saturn created just such an iconic facial expression.

Where are Saturn's ears? Galileo is credited, in 1610, as the first person to see Saturn's rings. Testing out Lipperhey's recently co-invented telescope, Galileo did not know what they were and so called

What is creating the strange texture of IC 418? Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool, planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns that are not well understood.

Main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson is about 8 kilometers long and 3.5 kilometers across. On April 20, this sharp close-up of the asteroid was captured at a distance of about 1100 kilometers by the

Beautiful emission nebula NGC 6164 was created by a rare, hot, luminous O-type star, some 40 times as massive as the Sun. Seen at the center of the cosmic cloud, the star is a mere 3 to 4 million years

What's different about this Moon? It's the terminators. In the featured image, you can't directly see any terminator -- the line that divides the light of day from the dark of night. That's because the

Is this one galaxy or two? Although it looks like one, the answer is two. One path to this happening is when a small galaxy collides with a larger galaxy and ends up in the center. But in the featured

The Great Nebula in Orion is a colorful place. Visible to the unaided eye, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. Long exposure, multi-wavelength images like this, however, show

In late March, the comet now designated C/2025 F2 SWAN was found independently by citizen scientists Vladimir Bezugly, Michael Mattiazzo, and Rob Matson while examining publicly available image data from

Galaxies of the Virgo Cluster are scattered across this nearly 4 degree wide telescopic field of view. About 50 million light-years distant, the Virgo Cluster is the closest large galaxy cluster to our

What created the unusual halo around the Cat's Eye Nebula? No one is sure. What is sure is that the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae on the sky. Although haunting

What happens when a star runs out of nuclear fuel? For stars like our Sun, the center condenses into a white dwarf while the outer atmosphere is expelled into space to appear as a planetary nebula. The

What's happening at the center of our galaxy? It's hard to tell with optical telescopes since visible light is blocked by intervening interstellar dust. In other bands of light, though, such as radio,

Most of us watch the Moon at night. But the Moon spends nearly as many daylight hours above our horizon, though in bright daytime skies the lunar disk looks pale and can be a little harder to see. Of course

Made with a telescope shaded from bright sunlight by an umbrella, on April 5 a well-planned video captured a crescent Venus shining in clear daytime skies from Shoreline, Washington, USA at 11:57AM Pacific

From a garden on planet Earth, 38 hours of exposure with a camera and small telescope produced this cosmic photo of the M81 galaxy group. In fact, the group's dominant galaxy M81 is near the center of

What's at the tip of this interstellar jet? First let's consider the jet: it is being expelled by a star system just forming and is cataloged as Herbig-Haro 49 (HH 49). The star system expelling this jet

Sometimes, the Moon visits the Pleiades. Technically, this means that the orbit of our Moon takes it directly in front of the famous Pleiades star cluster, which is far in the distance. The technical term

How much mass do flocculent spirals hide? The featured image of flocculent spiral galaxy NGC 4414 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope to help answer this question. Flocculent spirals -- galaxies

Why are there so many moonquakes? Analyses of seismometers left on the moon during the Apollo moon landings reveal a surprising number of moonquakes occurring within 100 kilometers of the surface. In fact,