View larger. | The shortest day is at the solstice. But many are surprised to learn that the latest sunrises come days or weeks after the solstice. This map shows the number of days between earliest sunset and latest sunrise, for various latitudes. And it shows the dates of these events. When is your latest … Read more
An all-sky camera at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville, Alabama, caught this meteor streaking overhead in January 2012. Credit: NASA/MSFC/Meteoroid Environments Office/Bill Cooke and Danielle Moser Friday, December 27By 8 P.M. local time, Gemini is well above the eastern horizon, rising to the left of the widely recognizable constellation Orion. The Twins’ two … Read more
As we eagerly await Doom: The Dark Ages, which will hopefully arrive in 2025, many diehard fans are replaying the entire Doom. Twenty years later, Doom 3 continues to be an inflection point for the franchise, and gamers still can’t agree on whether it was great or a disappointment. What if it was a bit … Read more
With light pollution a major problem for stargazing in city and suburban areas, it can be hard to see stars without the right equipment to counteract it. Night vision monoculars may be the perfect bit of kit to see through the haze of light pollution. Having been through rounds of technological improvement over the past … Read more
Skeleton Crew hit a bit of a slump last week with a fourth episode that nailed the sincere exchanges between characters, but not much else. Thankfully, episode 5 – directed by Beef and Thunderbolts’ Jake Schreier – has the spark of the first three and completely embraces Star Wars’ more colorful and unserious side. Mind … Read more
SpaceX had a pretty good 2024. Elon Musk’s company broke its own record for most launches in a single year, continued pushing the boundaries of rocket reuse and made serious strides toward getting Starship, its next-generation megarocket, up and running. Oh, and Musk has apparently entered the inner circle of President-elect Donald Trump, wielding political … Read more
The U.S. military took this image on January 2, 2005, of the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami at a village near Sumatra. The deadly tsunami struck after a 9.1-magnitude earthquake on December 26, 2004. Image via Philip A. McDaniel/ United States Navy/ Wikimedia Commons (public domain). 20-year anniversary of the Boxing Day tsunami It … Read more
View larger. | NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of Io on December 30, 2023. A new NASA study suggested Io doesn’t have a global subsurface ocean of magma. Rather, each of Io’s raging volcanoes is self-powered with its own magma pool. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Gerald Eichstädt. Jupiter’s moon Io is the … Read more
What was your skywatching highlight of 2024? The rare total solar eclipse seen from North America? A moonless Perseid meteor shower? Or did you revel in the northern lights appearing above your home? Here’s what happened in the skies above in 2024 in spectacular images. 1. ‘Great American Eclipse’ The total solar eclipse on April … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was specifically intended to address some of the greatest unresolved questions in cosmology. These include all of the major questions scientists have been pondering since the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) took its deepest views of the Universe: the Hubble Tension, how the first stars and galaxies came together, how … Read more