Visible planets and night sky guide for August
Mercury soon to go behind sun This image is from the sun-observing SOHO spacecraft. It’s showing activity around the sun…
Titan is the only place besides Earth with stable liquid on its surface, a working weather cycle and complex organic chemistry — and now, according to 2025 NASA research, a plausible mechanism for building the first membrane around a primitive cell, without liquid water involved.
Titan has an unusual way of making an alien landscape feel familiar. Clouds gather. Rain falls. Rivers cut…
In January 1946, eleven years before Sputnik, a US Army radio crew in New Jersey bounced a signal off the Moon and heard it come back 2.5 seconds later, and that echo was the first time anything humans made had touched another world
On the morning of 10 January 1946, at a scrubby Army post near the New Jersey shore called…
APOD: 2026 August 22 – Mostly Perseids
Explanation: Recorded the night of August 12-13, images from four dedicated meteor-monitoring cameras at an astronomical observatory in…
A comet that drifted between the stars for millions or even billions of years before entering our Solar System carries water with roughly 30 times more heavy hydrogen than a typical comet here, suggesting its ice formed in an extraordinarily cold alien planetary system.
For most of its existence, 3I/ATLAS was an invisible piece of ice moving between the stars. Then its…
Lunar legacy: U of A researchers building moon-bound camera
Even the smallest of shadows on the moon’s surface can harbor water ice and other chemical compounds, known…
White Dwarf-Red Dwarf Binaries Power Cosmic Lasers
Astronomers have been intrigued by a certain type of binary systems that pulse with long-period bursts of radio…
Starship Passes Two Engine Tests Before Orbital Flight
When could Starship launch? Sources disagree on the timing. Tesla Oracle writes that, if the remaining tests go…
Rocket Lab and MIT are preparing a privately funded probe to plunge through Venus’s clouds looking for organic chemistry linked to possible life. It will get only about five minutes to take measurements before descending into increasingly lethal conditions — and the entire mission has been estimated at under $10 million.
Rocket Lab’s planned Venus probe is built around an uncomfortable trade: the spacecraft can be small and comparatively…
Skylab completists, clear some shelf space for 26 DVDs
offbeat Decades of archive hunting recover downlinks, silent reels, and footage once thought lost The team behind the…
JWST finds early galaxies may be 4 times more massive than thought
Astronomers have found that some of the largest galaxies in the early universe contained many more small stars…
Near-total lunar eclipse is coming up with the Americas in prime position
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Now it’s the moon’s turn to pull a disappearing act. After being shut out…