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Welcome to the night sky report for February 2026 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. Special note: The Moon could have human visitors for the first time since 1972 this month. NASA's Artemis II manned mission has its first opportunity to launch to the moon on February 8th. Four astronauts will travel beyond Earth’s orbit and fly around the Moon on Artemis II, a mission that will test NASA’s systems and hardware for human exploration of deep space. The approximately 10-day mission will test the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft, named Integrity. For this month’s observing, the Winter Triangle is your guide to the night sky. The northern hemisphere is treated to views of the stars Procyon, Sirius, and Betelgeuse, as well as awe-inspiring views of the Great Orion Nebula (M42, NGC 1976), sculpted by the stellar winds of its central bright stars. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

On the cold morning of January 28, 1986, 40 years ago today, the Challenger shuttle crew of seven astronauts died tragically in the explosion of their spacecraft during the launch of STS-51L from the Kennedy Space Center. The explosion occurred 73 seconds into the flight as a result of a leak in one of two solid rocket boosters that ignited the main liquid fuel tank. The crew members of the Challenger represented a cross-section of America in terms of race, gender, geography, background, and religion. It was a shockingly sad day for all of us. The explosion became one of the most significant events of the 1980s, as millions around the world saw the tragic event unfold on live television.

Since December 2021, when the James Webb super telescope saw first light, some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, researchers around the world have been scratching their heads over unexplained red dots among stars and galaxies in the images taken by the telescope. The so-called ‘little red dots’ can be seen when the Universe was “only” several hundred million years old, and a billion years later, they seem to disappear again. So what were they?

Happy New Year and welcome to the night sky report for January 2026 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. This month, Jupiter is at its biggest and brightest all year and the Moon and Saturn pair up in a conjunction. The January sky is also filled with bright stars in the constellations Orion, Taurus, Gemini, Canis Major, and Canis Minor. Find these cosmic gems by looking toward the southeast in the first few hours after it gets dark. The northern hemisphere also features beautiful views of Capella - a pair of giant yellow stars, Aldebaran - a red giant star, and three star clusters [the Hyades (Caldwell 41), the Pleiades (M45), and the Praesepe (M44, NGC 2632, also known as the Beehive Cluster)]. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

The primary goal of Project Gemini was to demonstrate NASA’s ability to perform all the basic capabilities that would be required for the Apollo Program in order to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s. Paramount among those capabilities was the rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft, required for the future Moon landing missions. An additional goal was to ensure that spacecraft and astronauts could function for at least eight days, considered to be the minimum time for a round-trip mission to the Moon. On December 15, 1965, Gemini VI and VII accomplished these two important milestones...But not as originally envisioned by NASA.

Welcome to the night sky report for December 2025 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. During the month, Comet 3I/ATLAS makes its closest approach to Earth, the Geminid meteor shower sparkles across the sky, and the Moon and Jupiter get close for a conjunction. Step outside on a cold December night when the stars shine bright to find the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and Cepheus. They will help you locate a binary star system (Eta Cassiopeiae), a fan-shaped open star cluster M103 (NGC 581), and a variable star (Mu Cephei). Also, throughout the month, you can find Pegasus, the winged stallion, high overhead in the south. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

In 2023, astronomers detected a huge collision. Two unprecedentedly massive black holes had crashed an estimated 7 billion light-years away. The enormous masses and extreme spins of the black holes puzzled astronomers. Black holes like these were not supposed to exist. Now, astronomers with the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) and their colleagues have figured out just how these black holes may have formed and collided. The astronomers’ comprehensive simulations uncovered the missing piece that previous studies had overlooked: magnetic fields.

Welcome to the night sky report for November 2025 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus are visible during the month. Venus and Mars are no longer visible as they are very low in the sky after sunset. Also this month, hunt for the fainter constellations of fall, including Pisces, Aries, and Triangulum. They will guide you to several galaxies, including the spiral galaxies M74 (NGC 628, the Phantom Galaxy) and M33 (NGC 598, the Triangulum Galaxy). The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

Billions of years ago, the early Solar System was a swirling disk of gas and dust that eventually clumped and accumulated to form the Proto-Earth and its neighboring planets. Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered extremely rare remnants of our “Proto-Earth,” which formed about 4.5 billion years ago, before a colossal collision irreversibly altered the primitive planet’s composition and produced the Earth as we know today. Their findings will help scientists piece together the primordial starting ingredients that forged the early Earth and the rest of the Solar System.

Welcome to the night sky report for October 2025 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. During October, a supermoon takes over the sky, the Draconid meteor shower peeks through, and the Orionid meteor shower shines bright. The crisp, clear October nights are also full of celestial showpieces for the deep sky gazer. For example, find Pegasus the flying horse of Greek mythology to pinpoint nice dense globular clusters and galaxies. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase, so get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

The upcoming appropriations budget for the ongoing Juno mission, starting October 1, 2025, is being completely defunded - it will be immediately and completely discontinued, right in the middle of the mission, after many years of designing, building, testing and launching have been already accomplished. Talk about a waste! If you believe that it is our country's best interests to continue the Juno mission, your only chance will be to immediately reach out to the key people on the Appropriations committees - here is a list of who to call, and email, and suggestions on what to say.

Located about 55 million light-years away from Earth, M87 harbors a supermassive black hole more than six billion times the mass of the Sun. It is designated as M87*. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of radio telescopes acting as an Earth-sized observatory, first captured the iconic image of M87’s black hole shadow in 2019. Now, by comparing observations from 2017, 2018, and 2021, scientists have taken the next step towards uncovering how the magnetic fields near the black hole change over time. The new images reveal a dynamic environment with changing polarization patterns near the black hole. Additionally, the scientists found the first signatures of the extended jet emission near the jet base, which connects to the ring around M87*. These new observations are providing new insights into how matter and energy behave in the extreme environments surrounding black holes.

A blowtorch of seething gasses erupting from a volcanically growing monster star has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Stretching across 8 light-years, the length of the stellar eruption is approximately twice the distance between our Sun and the next nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system. The size and strength of this particular stellar jet, located in a nebula known as Sharpless 2-284 qualifies it as rare. The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb studies every phase in the history of our Universe and is unique in that it does not orbit around the Earth like the Hubble Space Telescope. Instead, it orbits the Sun 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2.