Gerald Ford, the United States' 38th president, passed away yesterday at age 93. Most citizens, regardless of how they feel about his political affiliation, give him credit for mending a nation rocked by the Watergate scandal created by his predecessor...

I haven't seen many dark skies. I guess I'm just a city girl. It's easy to forget to look up when there's not much to see except Orion and the Moon. I've seen them before. But I've been to Kitt Peak in Arizona, where I marveled...

Satellite images have become such a staple of nightly TV weather segments, it's difficult to imagine a time when they didn't exist. Yet, the first full-disk images of a cloudy Earth turned 40 earlier this month. It's not much to look at by...

You can cram a lot of data in a 156-page book. For example, we just received Steve Coe's Nebulae and How to Observe Them (Springer, London, 2006). If you're a beginning or intermediate observer, and if you're interested in observing nebulae...

Time travel has always intrigued me. Sometimes, I like to imagine what it would have been like to witness an historic event. Say, to be on the balcony with Galileo when he first saw the moons of Jupiter or the phases of Venus, and started us down the...

At the start of the classic film Enter the Dragon , Bruce Lee's character tells one of his students to consider a finger pointed at the Moon. As the student closely examines Lee's finger, Lee slaps him on the head and says, "Don't concentrate...

Mathematicians like me find numbers in almost everything we do. Last night, the key number was 11 — a simple count of the number of Geminid meteors I saw while observing for 1 hour centered around the shower's predicted peak at 2:45 A.M. CST...

Today marks 34 years since Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan became the last astronaut to tread on the Moon's surface. He and Harrison H. Schmitt, the first scientist on the Moon, landed on the lunar surface December 11, 1972. The lunar module took off...

On Wednesday afternoon at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, the Planetary Society announced a major award for "asteroid tagging." The $50,000 prize will be awarded to the winner of the Society's Apophis Mission Design...

Astronomers at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco are debating predictions of what the next solar cycle, number 24, which will start next year and will peak in 2011, will be like. Ironically, with new techniques to analyze solar cycles...

Larry Esposito knows planetary rings. In 1979, as a member of the imaging team for the Pioneer 11 Saturn flyby, he discovered the planet’s kinked and braided F ring. He’s also a member of the science team for the Cassini probe, now orbiting...

Sitting around in the office at Astronomy 20 years ago, our editors used to joke about stories in the magazine centered on Earth. But then it struck us, why limit ourselves to just the other planets? Why not study important Earth stories in the pages...

The onset of winter heralds many things amateur astronomers love: maximum darkness, high Full Moons, and Orion the Hunter at its summit. Add to these the sights and sounds of the Christmas season. Bah, humbug! Don't get me wrong. I like even the tackiest...

What do you get when you combine four video projectors, five computers, and a suspended, 6-foot-wide white sphere? An entirely new way to tell visual stories, says Michael Starobin, senior media producer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside...

NASA hopes to launch the space shuttle Discovery this evening. If it blasts off on schedule, observers in northeast Florida may witness a rare, perhaps unprecedented event: a shuttle's passage across the face of a nearly Full Moon. Discovery looks...

I had a flying instructior once - his name was John - who told about some of the darkest skies in the United States - over North Dakota. John was flying cross-country in his Cessna 172 at night. It was so dark that he couldn't see the horizon. The...