Mystic Mountain Monster being Destroyed

2026-04-26

Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The huge monster, actually an inanimate series of pillars of gas and dust, measures light years in length. The in-head star is not itself visible through the ...

The Persistence of Sunlight

2026-04-25 Lorenzo Busilacchi

This seaside sunset offered a surreal experience, captured in a sea and skyscape from the west coast of Sardinia, Italy, planet Earth. The Daliesque scene is a composition of sequential exposures made with a camera and long telephoto lens. The ...

Young Moon and Sister Stars

2026-04-24 Giorgia Hofer

Sunlit arms of a crescent moon seem to embrace the faint lunar night side in this dramatic celestial scene from planet Earth. The single telephoto exposure tracking the sky was captured on the night of April 19, when a two day old Moon was near ...

Large Scale Structure of the Universe

2026-04-23

This is a map of the universe. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona, has finished its five-year survey. It observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and created a 3D map centered on ...

Earthset with an iPhone

2026-04-22

What does it mean for the Earth to set? Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman gave us another spectacular view of Earth from their historic flyby of the Moon. Commander Wiseman's video, taken with an iPhone at 8x zoom, shows our entire planet ...

Three Sky Arches over Snowy Alps

2026-04-21 Angel Fux

Why are there three arches across the sky instead of two? Last month, after being dropped off by a helicopter at a high mountain peak in the Alps near the Swiss Italian border, an adventurous astrophotographer expected two arches of our Milky Way ...

Comet R3 PanSTARRS over a Himalayan...

2026-04-20 Basudeb Chakrabarti & Samit Saha

The best way to see comet R3 PanSTARRS’s long tail is with a camera. This week, the recently brightened comet appears in northern skies to the east just before dawn, but is only barely visible to the unaided eye. The many-degree ion tail captured ...

Eye on the Milky Way

2026-04-19 Miguel Claro (TWAN, Dark Sky Alqueva)

Have you ever had stars in your eyes? It appears that the eye on the left does, and moreover, it appears to be gazing at even more stars. The featured 27-frame mosaic was taken in 2019 from Ojas de Salar in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The eye ...

PanSTARRS and Planets

2026-04-18 Luc Perrot

Near the eastern horizon before sunrise, Comet C/2025 R3 PanSTARRS is getting brighter. Readily visible in binoculars and small telescopes, the comet may be just on the verge of naked-eye visibility from dark sky sites. Though it was not quite ...

M82: Starburst Galaxy with a Superwind

2026-04-17 Arnaud Malleval

Messier 82 is a starburst galaxy with a superwind. In fact, through supernova explosions and powerful winds from massive stars, the burst of star formation in M82 is driving a prodigious outflow. Evidence for the superwind from the galaxy's ...