Last summer, my colleague Michael Bakich, a senior editor at Astronomy , kindly gave me a special filter that fits on the front of my 4-inch Celestron NexStar, thus allowing me to observe the Sun without turning my eyeball into a poached egg. I looked at the Sun with the new setup. Nada. Nothing! Thanks to this cool graphic just released by NASA, it’s clear why the Sun is so, well, boring to look at lately. We are in a deep “solar minimum,” a period...

Check out this video from Astronomy reader Robert Massey of Fort Worth, Texas. Look to the top left of the grouping of four bright stars, at about the 11 o’clock position. A blob appears to move to the left. The video shows an object — a satellite or perhaps an asteroid? — tumbling through the field of view of Massey’s Meade 12-inch LX200 telescope. At the time he was observing M42, the Orion Nebula. In his own words: “I have been behind a telescope...

Did you see the gorgeous moonset Friday night (February 27)? A slender crescent Moon — “horns” pointing upward — set along with Venus close by. Earthshine illuminated the body of the Moon above the horns. Someone once told me this is called “the new Moon in the cradle of the old.” If you looked at Venus with a small telescope or binoculars, you would have noticed that the planet was, like the Moon, a delicate crescent. In the east, Saturn rose after...

It’s not every day you get a mysterious new celestial object named after you. But that’s what happened to Hanny van Arkel (pictured below), a primary schoolteacher from The Netherlands. And all she had to do was point and click. Van Arkel discovered a glowing green gaseous object, which scientists dubbed “Hanny’s Voorwerp” (Dutch for “Hanny’s object,” pictured at right). It was an early success from the Galaxy Zoo project, one of the biggest-ever...

Astronomy magazine’s offices are located in an office park off I-94 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I’m one of the lucky people here blessed with a corner window that provides a pretty wide view of the sky. In summer, I watch wicked thunderstorm systems scudding due east on their way to die over Lake Michigan. During early evenings — when you can sometimes find some of us in our offices dotting i’s and crossing t’s on the latest astronomical discoveries ...

This month, Cambridge University Press published Astronomy columnist Stephen James O’Meara ’s latest book for stargazers, Observing the Night Sky with Binoculars . The book — billed as “a simple guide to the heavens” — is for beginners. This is a new direction for Steve, who has published several guides to observing deep-sky objects with telescopes. I asked him why he wrote the book and how readers could benefit from it. Pendick: How did this book...