StarDate

The Moon butts up against the tip of one of the horns of Taurus early tomorrow. They’ll appear to almost touch as they climb into good view, around 2:30 or 3 a.m. They’ll be closest as viewed from th…

Planets can really get around. In the early days of our own solar system, for example, the giant outer planets may have moved toward or away from the Sun by hundreds of millions of miles. And many of…

A star system in the constellation Ophiuchus keeps blowing up. Every 15 years or so, it flares about 1500 times brighter than average. And it could be building up to an even bigger outburst – a final…

For a few weeks in the spring of 1764, Charles Messier was a star-cluster-discovering machine. He found five globular clusters in Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer. He cataloged them as Messier 9, 10, 12…

Barnard 68 is one of the darkest objects in our section of the galaxy. It’s a small cloud that absorbs the light of the stars behind it, so it looks like a dark “hole” in the Milky Way. Before long, …

The gods of ancient Greece had complicated relationships. As an example, consider Ophiuchus. He’s represented by a constellation that passes across the southern sky on summer evenings.

The constellat…

Earth has something in common with Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. They’re the only two bodies in the solar system with liquids flowing and ponding on the surface. In the case of Earth, that liqui…

One of the best-known meteor showers will be at its best the next couple of nights. Unfortunately, the gibbous Moon will be in the sky during the best hours for meteor watching. That will spoil the v…

Social media may go wild the next few days – filled with reports of UFOs in the early morning sky. Ignore them. The objects are fully identified. They’re the planets Venus and Jupiter – the brightest…

Based on how bright the stars look to our eyes alone, Deneb ranks among the 20 brightest stars in the night sky. Because the stars are at different distances, though, that ranking is a little mislead…

Altair is a close neighbor – just 16.7 light-years away. Only about 50 star systems are closer. And it’s bigger and brighter than the Sun, so it’s easy to study. Even so, not even the largest individ…

A bright Moon is a beautiful sight – unless you have your heart set on seeing the stars. In that case, it’s a pest. The Moon’s glare overpowers many of the stars in the sky.

But some manage to shine …

The universe follows a set of rules – the laws of physics. Those laws govern everything from the vibrations of the strings on a cello to the motions of the stars and planets. In fact, for centuries i…

Many of us have our own muse – someone who’s inspired us in a profound way. Such people can be seen as the descendants of the original Muses – goddesses who inspired great accomplishments in music, d…

The number of known “exoplanets” that might sustain life keeps going up – it’s in the hundreds. Such a planet is in the “habitable zone” of its parent star – the distance where conditions are most co…

Mars appears to have a shadow this evening – a faint star with one of the more lyrical names in the heavens: Zavijava. Mars looks like a fairly bright orange star, quite low in the west as darkness f…

For a star, passing too close to a black hole is never a good thing. If the star doesn’t get eaten, it can get kicked into a high-speed jaunt across the cosmos. And astronomers can track the path of …

A small star with a planetary companion appears to be making a high-speed exit from the center of the Milky Way – perhaps fast enough to escape the galaxy entirely.

The system is more than 24,000 lig…

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is never quiet – it’s constantly popping off.

The black hole is more than four million times the mass of the Sun. It grabs passing gas clouds…

Sagittarius marks the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. So the constellation is packed with stars, star clouds, and star clusters. But one of the clusters doesn’t belong to the Milky Way at a…