On June 25, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) discovered its 1,500th comet. This tally tops all other comet discoverers throughout history combined. From ESA: When it comes to comet catching, the SOHO has one big advantage over everybody...

Last week, I spent some time under the sunny, clear skies of Las Vegas, Nevada. I was the invited guest speaker at the Atomic Testing Museum . This facility — a real gem — sits 7 blocks from the famed Strip in downtown Las Vegas. The museum chronicles...

Look out, here comes the “Is Pluto a planet?” debate — again. I wade into these waters with trepidation and wearing armored hip waders. But on the other hand, how often does a guy get a chance to stir up a pot of angry astro-hornets? I won’t regurgitate...

The EISCAT European space station in the Arctic Circle will pepper an unfortunate solar system in Ursa Major with a Doritos ad. EISCAT How little do we think of potential extraterrestrial life? Not much, it seems. The University of Leicester helped...

The orbits of stars within the central 1.0 X 1.0 arcseconds of our galaxy. Andrea Ghez/UCLA Reinhard Genzel, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, has won this year’s Shaw Prize for astronomy. Genzel...

Peter Chen displays his 12-inch “moondust mirror.” AAS photo by Richard Dreiser © 2008 American Astronomical Society Once upon a time, the buzzwords in telescope making were Teflon and Formica. In the future, though, they may be epoxy and lunar dust....

Astronomers now recognize 88 constellations. A memory aid I’ve used through the years is that there are the same number of constellations as keys on a full piano keyboard. Today’s star groups cover the sky with no overlaps and no gaps between them. This...

Three of the most luminous supernovae on record — 2006gy, 2005gj, and 2005ap — pose problems for theorists. For example, 2006gy’s peak luminosity reached 50 billion Suns. That’s 10 times brighter than the average type Ia supernova and 100 times brighter...