SUNSET: 
National Park Service Tracks Light Pollution
As part of the NPS Night Sky program, scientists are helping protect dark skies as a national treasure.
Excellent Asteroid Occultation Friday Morning, May 5, 2006
The best asteroid occultation ever predicted for the American Northeast happens before dawn on May 5, 2006.
Comet-Like Asteroids
These images from the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter telescope show the three known main-belt comets at the center of each panel. The fuzz around each comet is suspected to be dust that is ejected as water ice sublimates.H. Hsieh and D. Jewitt (University of Hawaii) Two astronomers have uncovered a…
Lessons from an Odd Kuiper Belt Object
The shape of 2003 EL61 is at least 1,960 x 1,500 x 1,000 kilometers — making it a fast-rotating squashed football.NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI) To date astronomers have found more than 1,000 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) beyond Neptune, and the strangest one of all might just be the…
A Big New Step in the Search for ET
The world's largest optical SETI telescope begins sweeping millions of stars for laser signals from alien civilizations.
Astro News Briefs: April 3–9
NASA's Dawn Mission Gets a Reprieve April 4, 2006 | After enduring weeks of outrage from space scientists and an official objection from the director of its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA has reversed its decision to cancel the Dawn asteroid mission. NASA associate administrator Rex Geveden, who chaired a high-level…
A Supernova's Backwash May Form Planets
Astronomer-artist Robert Hurt depicts the disk around the neutron star 4U 0142+61. The disk contains about 10 Earth masses of material and orbits very close to the star. Click on the image for a larger view.Courtesy NASA / JPL / Caltech / R. Hurt (SSC). For many years astronomers have…
Why Galaxies Tilt Just So
Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way got oriented by forces shaping the entire cosmos.
Astro News Briefs: January 9–15
News from the 207th American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC
The April 1st Pleiades Occultation
The waxing crescent Moon made quite a spectacle crossing the Pleiades on April Fool's Day 2006.
Views of the March 29th Solar Eclipse
A round, symmetrical corona, characteristic of solar minimum, surrounded the Sun and Moon when they were aligned at totality.
First Picture from Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter
Having entered Martian orbit, NASA's latest explorer has tried out its record-breaking camera.
A Grand Pleiades Occultation on April 1, 2006
Watch the dark edge of the crescent Moon blot out one star after another on the evening of April 1, 2006.
Cosmic Explosion Mystery Deepens
Artist Dana Berry depicts the short gamma-ray burst (GRB) that occurs when a neutron star falls into a black hole. Astronomers are beginning to realize that other violent events can also cause short GRBs.Courtesy NASA / GSFC / Dana Berry. Just when astronomers thought they had solved one of astronomy's…
Celestial Sleuths Solve Another Munch Mystery
For a century art historians have wondered why Edvard Munch chose not to depict a celestial reflection in his famous painting Girls on the Pier. Now the mystery is solved.
Cosmic Collisions Is a Smash Hit
From the opening words to the closing credits, the new show Cosmic Collisions premiering this week at New York City's Hayden Planetarium is truly a blockbuster.
WMAP Bolsters Case for Cosmic Inflation
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is leftover radiation from the Big Bang redshifted (stretched), by the universe's expansion, into the microwave region of the spectrum. In this image NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) records minuscule temperature differences in the CMB as different colors. The hotter and cooler spots evolved…
Martian Ice: Wide and Deep
Mars Express's onboard radar sounder has spotted vast "glaciers" of ice under the Red Planet's surface.
Stardust's Tiny Treasures
Scientists studying the comet fragments brought home by the Stardust sample-return mission are already scratching their heads trying to understand the things they see.
