SUNSET: 
Tour August's Sky: Planets Aplenty
Download or play Sky & Telescope's astronomy podcast, and you'll get a guided tour of the night sky. In early evening look for Mars and Saturn embedded in Scorpius toward south, and key an eye out for Perseid meteors.
Students Discover a Galactic Eye of Horus
Undergraduate students in Japan stumbled upon a rare lensing of two distinct background galaxies.
Delta Aquariids Kick Off Summer Meteor Showers
The meteors are coming! Three annual meteor showers are already active and guaranteed to spark up your summer nights.
NASA’s K2 Mission Confirms 100+ Exoplanets
Kepler’s K2 mission has confirmed 104 new exoplanets — including a rocky, four-planet system.
Missing Craters on Ceres
The dwarf planet has a paucity of big pockmarks because it has somehow erased them.
No Dark Matter from LUX Experiment
An underground detector reports zero detections of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), the top candidate for mysterious dark matter.
MeerKAT in South Africa Sees First Light
The MeerKAT radio telescope has produced its first light image — even at quarter-strength, it’s already the best of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.
Dark Streaks on Mars Revisited
New research on seasonal streaks in Martian canyons provides evidence against underground pools of water.
Mars 2020 Rover Construction Moves Ahead
The Mars 2020 rover reached a third crucial milestone this past week on the path to the launch pad.
Antonín Rükl, 1932–2016
A world-renowned lunar cartographer, whose beautiful atlases have become prized possessions, has died at age 83.
See Two Tricky Occultations — Neptune and Lambda (λ) Aqr
Now you see 'em, now you don't. Watch the Moon occult Neptune and nearby Lambda Aquarii on the same night.
Seeing a Black Hole’s Gravitational Vortex
New observations solve a 30-year-old puzzle of mysterious signals from around black holes.
The Making of a “Frankenstein” Galaxy
Astronomers take a second look at UGC 1382 — previously considered a typical elliptical galaxy — and reassess everything they know about its size, age, and formation.
40th Anniversary of Viking's Red Planet Rendezvous
Some 200 of the mission’s surviving scientists and engineers and their families, along with many younger space explorers inspired by the Vikings, gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Viking 1 landing.
Kuiper Belt's Big, New, Far-Out Object
First spied last year, an object designated 2015 RR245 turns out to be one of the largest and most distant objects yet found orbiting the Sun.
A New Look at the Crab Nebula
A new Hubble Space Telescope image shows the very heart of the Crab Nebula, one of the most studied supernova remnants.
Old Radio Telescope Restored for New Uses
Abandoned for 25 years, a 12-meter antenna once used during the Cold War is now introducing astronomy students to the radio universe.
Exoplanet Found in Triple Star System
Astronomers have retracted the discovery of a giant planet with an exceptionally wide orbit in a young system of three suns.
Doomed Hitomi Gazed at Galaxy Cluster
In its first — and final — month of flight, the Hitomi X-ray observatory measured the calm within the bubbling core of the Perseus Cluster.
Giant Planets and Wonky Orbits
Kepler-108 is the first system observed with really wonky orbits, which may be a result of giant planets bumping into each other.
