Great March Comet of 1843 Do comets have family histories? Some do. We’ll discover the genealogical history of a special family of...

How to decipher an already translated   astronomical tablet from Uruk, that is, one of many, with an eye to understanding its most...

As Jupiter burns brightly in our night sky this month, our thoughts turn to how this great, brilliant beacon must have appeared twenty...

A surprising celestial event may have ripple effects on the progress of science. It can be a catalyst for reexamination of old paradigms,...

Early next year in the night sky, Mars will glow like a brilliant ember. As it nears earth for its January opposition, I thought I’d try...

About a century ago astronomy had a momentous year. Two discoveries in 1925 were to reshape cosmology and astrophysics. From Mt. Wilson...

You’ve probably never heard of 12P/Comet Pons-Brooks. But if you’d been riding on it, you’d now have a grand view of the inner solar...

It would be refreshing if newspaper headlines reported current astronomical events this way. Think what it would do for collective...

Is there such a thing? I don’t mean a perfect observing experience (which we all hope for but don’t always get), but an aspect of an...

I've long been intrigued by lengthy cycles of natural phenomena that overlay shorter ones. Nature has countless such extended cycles...

In 1901, sponge divers off the tiny Aegean island of Antikythera, Greece, discovered the remains of a Hellenistic era cargo ship which...

It’s sometimes satisfying in this age of new rockets to the moon, space probes around the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, and the...

It is a remarkable coincidence that the size and distance of the moon in our time just happens to cover the disk of the sun during an...

Everybody was waiting for the big day, July 12th when the initial images from the James Webb Space Telescope would be released to the...

I was thumbing through Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Nice, easy writing from an engaging popularizer. I...

One of the greatest discoveries in the 20th century was made by one of today’s lesser-known scientists, a man called Vesto Slipher. When...

Six decades ago was a very special time for America. I’m not talking about the fact that you could buy a Mercury Comet for $1,898 at the...

There’s a buzz of activity at the Arianespace's launch complex near Kourou, French Guiana. Finally, after so many delays, the James Webb...

On November 21, 2021, at 08:24 UTC, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will be at perihelion in another of its orbits around the sun, and it is...

Once at a party a good friend parked me in front of her mother, an intelligent and inquisitive woman who had deep connections with one of...