EXPLORING THE SOLAR SYSTEM is a long game, with travel times measured in years. And the time from when we first propose a mission to when our spacecraft sits on the launch pad, ready to leave Earth or die trying, is often much longer still. In a way,

The Moon was always considered an astronomical object. After all, it’s located in the sky and is best observed at night. But when, in 1962, US President John F. Kennedy decided that Americans should go to the Moon by the end of the decade, it then be

Edward Emerson Barnard is known today for a number of things. His photographic work is highly regarded, particularly his images published in 1927 in A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way. But he was also one of the most accomplish

The dinner bell has struck for a star in the constellation Aquila, the Eagle. Reporting in the May 4 issue of Nature, Kishalay De (MIT) and a team of astronomers watched the star belch and brighten in a way that suggests it swallowed a closely orbiti

“My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will — but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying

Observers use aperture masks to improve the view through a telescope, particularly under unsteady seeing. Such masks tend to fall into one of three categories. The first is off-axis, or stop-down, masks. These reduce the aperture to minimise the blur

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR IMAGES Gallery showcases the finest astronomical images that our readers submit. Send your best shots to photos@skyandtelescope.com.au. See skyandtelescope.com.au/contributions/ for guidelines.

As winter changes into spring for the Southern Hemisphere, several comets should be within the range of small backyard telescopes. Receding from its perihelion of July 31 (1.48 AU) and perigee (0.54) on July 20, C/2021 T4 (Lemmon) will probably still

We live in a great galaxy, one that’s far larger and brighter than most others in the cosmos. Abounding with countless stars and surrounded by dozens of satellite galaxies, the Milky Way is a giant barred spiral with a dark matter halo spanning some

WHEN I WAS 10 years old, nothing captured my imagination more than the canals of Mars and the magnificent (and rather tragic) story Percival Lowell told of a civilisation of intelligent beings having built them to stave off extinction on their dying

Near the eastern border of Sagittarius, the Archer, you’ll find a neat little cross asterism formed by four 5th-magnitude stars: 59, 60, 62 and Omega (ω) Sagittarii. At 2° tall and 1° wide, the asterism is big enough to be spotted with the naked eye,

THE BRIGHTEST PLANETS naturally get a lot of telescopic attention because most of them appear large enough to display interesting surface or atmospheric features. Neptune, on the other hand, is our Solar System’s most distant major planet and present

For many thousands of years, watchers of the night skies have noted points of light that look like stars and do not behave as other stars do. They shift their positions relative to the ‘fixed stars,’ which remain in the recognisable patterns we call

Continuing its run of ground-breaking discoveries, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has snapped the clearest images yet of the dusty debris disk around Fomalhaut, a bright, young star 25 lightyears away in Piscis Austrinus. The images reach a re

Last issue I took a look at the northern half of the giant curl of bright stars that is Scorpius, the Scorpion. This time we’re going to dive down into the constellation’s southerly half — a region brimming with wonders. Let’s start our tour with the