Astronomy
Poof! Mountain Blows Its Top To Make Way For Huge Telescope
All's clear for a huge telescope to start construction on a mountaintop in Chile! That puff you see is the top…
Watch A Mountaintop Blow Up Live For Astronomy Tomorrow
While we space geeks are lucky enough to watch rocket launches regularly, it's not often we get to see a…
Stunning Amateur Timelapse of Jupiter ‘Re-enacts’ Voyager Flyby
Back in the 1970's when NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, I remember being…
Asteroid-Turned-Comet 2013 UQ4 Catalina Brightens: How to See it This Summer
Though ISON may have fizzled in early 2014, we’ve certainly had a bevy of binocular comets to track this year.…
Astronomy Cast Ep. 349: Mercury 7 – How the US picked the First Astronauts
Before the Apollo Program, there was the Gemini Program, and before Gemini came the Mercury Program. 7 elite astronauts chosen…
Gaia Space Telescope Team Battles ‘Stray Light’ Problems At Start Of Mission
Europe's powerful Milky Way mapper is facing some problems as controllers ready the Gaia telescope for operations. It turns out…
‘Weird’ Dust Ring Baffles In Cloud That Will Give Birth To Giant Stars
Long after telescopes cease operating, their bounty of scientific data continues to amaze. Here's an example of that: this Herschel…
An Ocean On Pluto’s Moon? Hopeful Scientists Will Keep An Eye Out For Cracks
It's a lot of speculation right now, but the buzz in a new NASA study is Pluto's largest moon (Charon)…
Hubble Hubba: Stars Are Being Born Around A Black Hole In Galaxy’s Center
Let's just casually look at this image of a galaxy 86 million light-years away from us. In the center of…
How to See Airglow, the Green Sheen of Night
Emerald green, fainter than the zodiacal light and visible on dark nights everywhere on Earth, airglow pervades the night sky…