Sky & Telescope editors made their annual pilgrimage to the Northeast Astronomy Forum to check out new astro-gear and meet up with contributors and readers alike.
NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission wowed the world enough to earn a space spoof skit on Saturday Night Live one day after a perfect splashdown. Watch how it went.
Space is often described as a soundless, odorless vacuum, and while that is largely true, our interaction with the cosmos allows us to discover an intriguing array of sensory experiences—through scientific detection and the peculiar effects of space environments on matter.
"The discovery of this exceptional object has allowed us to accurately study the nature of the stars at the center of an elliptical galaxy in a remote era of the universe, when the galaxy was still young."
"Rise Wiseman" might be the most beloved mission mascot in history.
A little patience, luck and a well-placed camera can still deliver a dazzling fireball — even from a city.
Astronauts aboard Artemis 2 and the ISS connected across a record-breaking Earth–moon distance in the farthest crew call ever made in space.
New research shows that craters near the moon's south pole that have been in permanent shadow the longest are more likely to contain the most water ice.
A streak shot of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as it tears away from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Starlink 10-24 mission on April 14, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
SpaceX launched its 1,000th Starlink satellite so far in 2026 with an early morning Falcon 9 rocket launch Tuesday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
An ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet orbiting a young A-type star gave scientists using the Gemini South telescope a look at how both a star and its hot planet can have similar chemical compositions. The team, led by Arizona State University graduate student Jorge Antonio Sanchez, took spectra of the planet, called WASP-189b, using the Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph instrument on loan from McDonald Observatory in Texas. The observations measured the abundance of magnesium compared to silicon in the hot planet's atmosphere and allowed the team to compare it to the makeup of its parent star.
Even a modest telescope reveals the breathtaking Saturnian ring system that has captivated astronomers for four centuries, a world so alien in its beauty that first time observers often struggle to believe what they are seeing is real. But Saturn's rings are just the beginning. Beneath that iconic silhouette lies a planet of extraordinary extremes, a gas giant eleven times wider than Earth, spinning so fast that a single day lasts barely ten hours, and wrapped in a magnetic field so powerful it dominates a region of space millions of kilometres in every direction.
We have been searching for signals from other civilisations for over sixty years. Radio telescopes on Earth have swept the sky, listened patiently, and found nothing but silence. It is a search that demands extraordinary sensitivity and that is the problem, Earth and our very existence itself is getting in the way.
Space is full of objects that push the boundaries of imagination, but few do it quite as effectively as a black hole. At its simplest, a black hole is a region of space where gravity has become so overwhelmingly powerful that nothing, no matter, no light, nothing can escape its grip. They form when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse catastrophically inward, crushing an enormous amount of mass into an extraordinarily small space. The result is an object so dense that it warps the very fabric of space and time around it.
It just goes on and on, my friends.
"This is the least transparent NASA budget request I've ever seen — and I've literally looked through every single one since 1960."
Black holes are among the most fascinating and extreme objects in the universe. They are regions of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it.
When India's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter released the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) into the Shackleton crater on the Moon, they confirmed something scientists had speculated about for decades. The Moon, an airless and vacuum-desiccated body, has abundant sources of water ice around its poles! Located in the many craters that litter the region, these permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) prevent this water from being exposed to sunlight, which would cause it to sublimate and be lost into space.
The uncrewed Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL spacecraft, the S.S. Steven R. Nagel, arrived at the International Space Station on Monday (April 13), bringing with it about 11,000 pounds of supplies.
Rise joined the Artemis 2 crew as a mascot of the moon, bearing 5.6 million names. But the mascot quickly took on a new meaning.
A Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL spacecraft is captured by the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station on Monday, April 13, 2026. Image: NASA
The next cargo run to the International Space Station arrived at the orbiting outpost midday on Monday.
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