Planets Ahoy
30.09.2008

Can you spot the Solar System's four rocky planets? In the above image taken on September 20, all of them were visible in a single glance, but some of them may be different than you think. Pictured above, the brightest and highest object in the sky is the planet Venus.

Planets Align Over Australian Radio Telescope Array
10.03.2008

Last week, Mercury, Venus, and the Moon all appeared close together in Earth's sky. This picturesque conjunction was caught on camera behind elements of the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) near the town of Narrabri in rural New South Wales.

The Case of the Very Dusty Binary Star
25.09.2008

For astronomers, close binary star system BD+20 307 originally stood out because it is extremely dusty. A substantial amount of warm dust surrounding it causes the system to appear exceptionally bright at infrared wavelengths. Of course, dust associated with planet formation is often detected around young stars, stars only a few million years old.

The Gegenschein
26.12.2006

If you look carefully enough, you can even see the glow of the Sun in the opposite direction. At night this glow is known as the gegenschein (German for "counter glow"), and can be seen as a faint glow in an extremely dark sky. The gegenschein is sunlight back-scattered off small interplanetary dust particles.

Eclipse and Ecliptic
9.03.2007

When a Full Moon lies near the ecliptic there can be a lunar eclipse. That cosmic alignment is well illustrated in this composite of eclipse images recorded last Saturday near Paris, France. The projection...

Zodiacal Light
13.06.1999

Sometimes the sky itself seems to glow. Usually, this means you are seeing a cloud reflecting sunlight or moonlight. If the glow appears as a faint band of light running across the whole sky, you are probably seeing the combined light from the billions of stars that compose our Milky Way Galaxy.

A Sky Full Of Planets
4.12.1997

Look up tonight. Just after sunset, the crescent moon and all five "naked-eye" planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) will be visible (depending on your latitude), lying near our solar system's ecliptic plane.

Planet Building in HD 100546
2.05.2001

More than 100 billion boulders may be swarming in the disk around nearby star HD 100546. In a scene thought similar to the early years of our own Solar System, ever larger rocks are growing by colliding and accreting dust as the messy business of planet formation appears to be underway.

Pluto in True Color
19.03.2001

Pluto is mostly brown. The above picture captures the true colors of Pluto as well as the highest surface resolution so far recovered. No spacecraft has yet visited this most distant planet in our Solar System.

Planets Around Sun-Like Stars
31.01.1996

Do many Sun-like stars have planets? Speculation on this point has been ongoing since humanity's realization that other stars existed. Only in the past year, however, have answers and discoveries been realized. The above plot summarizes the four known cases of normal stars having planets.