Our fascination with black holes is pretty understandable; their one-way boundary, the “event horizon,” traps light, meaning no signal can ever travel from inside a black hole to outside. The edge of the black hole is thus a region of space and time that expressly forbids interlopers. That’s a recipe for mystery. And we all … Read more
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Richard Witkowski captured the aurora storm on May 10-11, 2024, from Indiana Dunes National Park. It was surely one of the best night sky events of this past year. Thanks, Richard! So how about 2025? We can’t predict the next auroral display, but we can provide a preview of … Read more
Historians will look back on 2024 as a special year for spaceflight. From SpaceX plucking a huge rocket out of the sky to the first privately funded spacewalk to the launch of a $5 billion mission to study an ice-covered ocean moon, this year held many record-breaking achievements and advances that brought humanity ever closer … Read more
Catching the best sky watching events for the coming year 2025. Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS captured over the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona. Credit: Robert Sparks How about that eclipse in 2024? Certainly, the Great North American Eclipse of April 8th 2024 was one for the ages, instilling the eclipse-chasing bug … Read more
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Amrinderjit Singh in Kyrgyzstan captured this image on June 7, 2024. Amrinderjit wrote: “While I was at Issyk-Kul Lake, I captured a nice refraction of the lake in the ball. Issy-Kul is a massive salt-water lake: 113 miles (182 km) long, 36 miles (58 km) wide and 2,303 feet … Read more
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Abhijit Patil in Big Sur, California, captured Comet A3 near the Milky Way on October 22, 2024. Thanks, Abhijit! The comet was one of our top 10 stories of 2024. See the full list below. Top 10 stories of 2024 2024 was a fantastic year for observers: many of … Read more
In 2018, NASA mission planners selected the Jezero Crater as the future landing site of the Perseverance rover. This crater was a natural choice, as it was once an ancient lake bed, as evidenced by the delta fan at its western edge. On Earth, these features form in the presence of flowing water that gradually … Read more