The bestselling author discusses his inspiration, creative process, and favorite scientific tidbits behind the feature film.

The Sun, along with more than 1,500 other stars, journeyed from the middle of the Milky Way to its current position a few billion years ago.

The distant ice giant Uranus is located in Taurus right now, not far from the famous (and easy-to-find) Pleiades star cluster, cataloged as M45. Tonight, the planet also sits a short distance due ...

French astronomer Charles Messier did not intend to be remembered for his discoveries of galaxies, nebulae, and stars clusters when he looked to the sky in the 1750s. Dubbed the “Ferret of Comets” by ...

High in the south this evening is Canis Minor the Little Dog, shining above the bright star Sirius, which lies closer to the horizon. True to its name, the Little Dog is a little constellation, ...

Io transits Jupiter’s broad disk late tonight, beginning at midnight EST. On the East Coast, Jupiter is still 40° high in the west at local midnight, readily visible as the brightest point of light in ...

Sixty-five years ago, the USSR shocked the world by sending the first robotic emissary from Earth to the Moon. The September 1959 impact of Luna 2 on northeastern Mare Imbrium was a stunning ...

With no Moon in the early-evening sky, let’s chase down a classic deep-sky object tonight: M1, the first entry in Charles Messier’s list of “not comets” and also known as the Crab Nebula. This smudge ...

The Galilean moon Callisto disappears behind Jupiter in an occultation early this morning. The catch is that the event is only visible from the western half of the U.S., but observers farther east can ...

Look north this evening for Ursa Major the Great Bear, whose back half is best known as the Big Dipper. The two stars on the far end of the cup from the handle are called the Pointer Stars: These are ...

One of the most enduring mysteries in astronomy may have just been solved — and sorry folks, it’s not aliens. In a paper posted last month to the arXiv preprint server, a team of astronomers report ...

In 2018, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission reached asteroid 101955 Bennu. Two years later, the spacecraft snagged a sample of its surface, which has since been returned to Earth. Now, astronomers are getting ...