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 ...

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!

April 21: Could this be your last glimpse of Comet PanSTARRS? The Lyrid meteor shower peaks this morning with minimal moonlight to interfere. The shower’s radiant — the point from which its meteors ...

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 ...

In 1927, a prescient astronomer named Georges Lemaître looked at data showing how galaxies move. He noticed something peculiar – all of them appeared to be speeding away from Earth. Not only that, but ...

Long before humanity could venture into space, astronomers dreamed of a telescope above Earth’s obscuring atmosphere. In 1962, this dream took a step toward reality when a National Academy of Sciences ...

Karen Meech doesn’t spend a lot of time digging through Earth’s rocks. An astronomer by trade, she is usually behind the telescope, investigating comets and looking for hints about how Earth got its ...

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.