On Monday night, February 18th, observers in the western U.S. and Mexico may see the occultation of a lifetime when a tiny asteroid momentarily blots out the night sky's brightest star. The post Will Sirius Disappear on February 18th? appeared first on Sky & Telescope. […]

Comet Iwamoto is visible as a binocular target from a dark sky. Follow it this week as it passes from Virgo into Leo. The post Comet Iwamoto Ascends and Brightens appeared first on Sky & Telescope. […]

February's Sky Tour podcast urges you to get outside early to gaze on three bright planets — then return in the evening to spot two more. The post February Sky Tour: Dawn & Dusk Planets appeared first on Sky & Telescope. […]

Astronomers have identified a periodic clearing at the gas giant's equator; amateurs may have spotted the change at the end of 2018. The post Astronomers Identify Weather Cycle on Jupiter appeared first on Sky & Telescope. […]

The Moon got bonked by a space rock during Sunday's total lunar eclipse. Take a look! The post A Space Rock Strikes Moon During the Total Lunar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope. […]

Measurements of gravitational waves from approximately 50 binary neutron stars over the next decade will definitively resolve an intense debate about how quickly our universe is expanding, according to new findings. […]

The Zwicky Transient Facility, based at the Palomar Observatory, has identified over a thousand new objects and phenomena in the night sky, including more than 1,100 new supernovae and 50 near-Earth asteroids. The alert system informs science teams of possible new objects or changes to known objects in the sky. […]

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered another mysterious dark storm on Neptune and provided a fresh look at a long-lived storm circling around the north polar region on Uranus. […]

This dazzling region of newly forming stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) was captured by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument (MUSE) on ESO's Very Large Telescope. The relatively small amount of dust in the LMC and MUSE's acute vision allowed intricate details of the region to be picked out in visible light. […]

Two of the planets which are orbiting the star Kepler 107 could be the result of an impact similar to that which affected the Earth to produce the moon. […]

Astronomers have spent decades looking for something that sounds like it would be hard to miss: about a third of the "normal" matter in the Universe. New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped them locate this elusive expanse of missing matter. […]

Measurements of gravitational waves from approximately 50 binary neutron stars over the next decade will definitively resolve an intense debate about how quickly our universe is expanding, according to findings from an international team that includes University College London (UCL) and Flatiron Institute cosmologists. […]

Less than a week after its inauguration on 17 January 2019, the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT), a prototype telescope proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), successfully detected its first Cherenkov light on January 23 at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona. A dual-mirrored Medium-Sized Telescope, the SCT is proposed to cover the middle of CTA's energy range (80 GeV – 50 TeV). […]

Kenya could soon host the only research-class observatory in equatorial Africa, thanks to a collaboration between the nation and the UK. […]

Astronomers have discovered an asteroid looping through the inner solar system on an exotic orbit. The unusual object is among the first asteroids ever found whose orbit is confined almost entirely within the orbit of Venus. The asteroid's existence hints at potentially significant numbers of space rocks arcing unseen in uncharted regions nearer to the sun. […]