Moon lovers, rejoice! Tonight’s full Moon will be in view longer than any other full Moon of the year – the Long-Night Moon.The full Moon lines up opposite the Sun, so it does just the op

Friday the 13th brings a bit of bad luck for skywatchers this year. The Geminid meteor shower is at its peak, and it’s generally one of the year’s best, with peak rates of more than a hund

Life has a way of adapting when things change. An impact by a giant asteroid wiped out most of the life on Earth about 66 million years ago. Within years, though, life began to rebound – especia

Antarctica has been a target in a cosmic shooting gallery over the past few million years. At least three big asteroids have exploded above the continent. And two of them were close enough to the grou

Several scientists plan to spend the next few weeks snowmobiling across the ice sheets of Antarctica. It’s not a vacation or an extreme-sports event. Instead, they’ll be hunting for meteor

Making planets is messy. It involves giant clouds of gas and dust, and frequent collisions between planetary building blocks. And it takes tens of millions of years to sort out.A good example of how

Astronomers were scattered across the globe 150 years ago today to watch a black dot move across the face of the Sun – a transit of the planet Venus. They’d use their observations to measu

The Moon barrels toward the planet Saturn tonight. Saturn looks like a prominent star to the upper left of the Moon at nightfall. As they drop lower in the sky, the gap between them will close. From m

Jupiter is like a mini solar system. The Sun’s largest planet has a family of almost a hundred known moons. Most of them are little more than cosmic flotsam – chips of rock and ice no more

Jupiter is backing up. The planet is in the “retrograde” portion of its trip across the sky. Instead of its usual eastward motion against the background of stars, it’s moving to the