Stars are huge — anywhere from about 10 times the diameter of Earth to a hundred thousand times or more. Such a scale is just hard to fathom. One way to envision it is to consider how long it would ta

Over the millennia, stars acquire a lot of names. Some make sense, some dont. And some of them might have gotten mixed up along the way.An example is the fourth-brightest star of Leo, the lion, whic

Immanuel Kant is best known for his ideas about philosophy, from ethics to the nature of knowledge. But he also played a role in the development of an idea about how planets are born. And while many o

Few constellations have as many backstories as Virgo, the virgin. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was linked with several goddesses, each with her own story.In one story, she was Dike, the goddess of

If you look straight up as the sky gets dark this evening, you wont see much of anything. The region thats high overhead is populated by some especially faint stars and constellations. But theres a

The Little Dipper is famous for the star at the tip of its handle: Polaris, the North Star. Earths axis points in that direction, so all the other stars in the night sky appear to circle around it.T

The Lyrid meteor shower is building toward its peak, on Sunday night. The Moon will be almost full then, so its glare will wash out all but the brightest of the shooting stars.The shower is the off

The Small Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Its about 200,000 light-years away, it contains hundreds of millions of stars, and its easily visible to the eye alone from the s

The heart of the lion stays close to the Moon the next couple of nights. The bright star that marks the lions heart is Regulus. Its to the lower left of the Moon at nightfall this evening, and to th

Two giants of the solar system huddle close together in the evening twilight the next few days. The viewing window is short, so you need to time it just right to see them.Jupiter and Uranus are low i