The Sky This Week from February 21 to 28: Saturn and Mercury meet

February 24, 2025, 30 minutes after sunset, looking west

Mercury and Saturn stand side by side in the early-evening sky near the end of February. Note that Neptune is not visible to the naked eye. Credit: Astronomy: Roen Kelly Friday, February 21The Moon passes 0.4° south of the bright red giant Antares in Scorpius this morning at 4 A.M. EST. The pair is visible … Read more

Meet Quipu, the largest structure in the universe

Quipu: A globe-shaped map with different colored dots, with the most dots being red and stretching almost from top to bottom.

The colored dots represent different superstructures out to 800 million light-years (250 megaparsecs) from Earth. The red dots denote Quipu, the largest structure in the universe. Yellow is Sculptor-Pegasus superstructure, green is Serpens-Corona Borealis, purple is Hercules and blue is Shapley. Image via Böhringer et al. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2025. Used with permission. Quipu is … Read more

Meet Taurus, home to star clusters, with Jupiter visiting

Taurus the Bull contains 2 star clusters that are easy to spot, the Pleiades and the Hyades. Taurus the Bull The constellation Taurus the Bull is visible during the fall through spring in the Northern Hemisphere (or spring through fall in the Southern Hemisphere). It sits in the evening sky close to the easy-to-see constellation … Read more

Meet Endurance, a pioneering NASA moon rover designed to survive the frigid lunar night

It is robotic moon machinery on steroids. Tagged as the Endurance sample return mission, it would collect bits and pieces from key lunar locations for later retrieval by future astronauts in NASA’s Artemis program. Furthermore, high-value collectibles snagged from those distant spots would be hauled back to Earth by astronauts. NASA has begun blueprinting the … Read more

See the moon meet up with Mars this in the night sky this week

If the weather is clear where you live on Tuesday evening (Dec. 17), look low above the east-northeast horizon at around 8:00 p.m. local standard time and you’ll see the waning gibbous moon, 89% illuminated, accompanied by a very bright and colorful star directly below it and two bright stars will above it. The two … Read more