The bestselling author discusses his inspiration, creative process, and favorite scientific tidbits behind the feature film.

The distant ice giant Uranus is located in Taurus right now, not far from the famous (and easy-to-find) Pleiades star cluster, cataloged as M45. Tonight, the planet also sits a short distance due ...

Look north this evening a couple hours after sunset and you’ll easily spot the large shape of the Big Dipper as it sits upside-down in the sky, appearing to pour from its cup into that of the smaller ...

Planning to run this year’s Messier marathon? March 14/15 and 21/22 are the best nights to give it a go. Your ideal order will differ with latitude, but this is a good place to start. Be sure to set ...

Look north this evening for Ursa Major the Great Bear, whose back half is best known as the Big Dipper. The two stars on the far end of the cup from the handle are called the Pointer Stars: These are ...

The Sun, along with more than 1,500 other stars, journeyed from the middle of the Milky Way to its current position a few billion years ago.

The Galilean moon Callisto disappears behind Jupiter in an occultation early this morning. The catch is that the event is only visible from the western half of the U.S., but observers farther east can ...

From Mars, Earth transits the Sun four times in a 284-year cycle. The transits occur in either May or November at intervals of 100.5, 79, 25.5, and 79 years. During these events, Earth and the Moon ...

Born on March 9, 1934, to Russian farmers, Yuri Gagarin worked as a foundry apprentice and attended a technical high school where he joined the “AeroClub.” In 1955, he began military flight training, ...

The only child of astronomer William Herschel, John Herschel was born March 7, 1792, in England. After studying mathematics at Cambridge University, Herschel began working with his father from 1816 ...

With no Moon in the early-evening sky, let’s chase down a classic deep-sky object tonight: M1, the first entry in Charles Messier’s list of “not comets” and also known as the Crab Nebula. This smudge ...

Io transits Jupiter’s broad disk late tonight, beginning at midnight EST. On the East Coast, Jupiter is still 40° high in the west at local midnight, readily visible as the brightest point of light in ...