Astronomy Magazine

Marco Wong, taken from Sussex, U.K. The Milky Way’s bright star fields and dense dust lanes arch above the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head and the English Channel in this wide-field nightscape. The photographer used a Canon DSLR and a 28mm f/1.4 lens to take a tracked vertical panorama of five panels of stacked sky

One of the earliest recorded eclipses is found in the Shijing, a collection of ancient poetry whose compilation is credited to Confucius. The eclipse in question occurred during the Zhou dynasty. Though the exact date is uncertain, some astronomers have pointed to the total eclipse of June 4, 781 B.C.E. (though this would have only been a

Looking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column.  June 3: Juno stands still Jupiter passes 6° due south of Pollux at 7 A.M. EDT, although neither object is visible in the daylit sky. Instead, check out the scene after sunset this evening, with Jupiter still south of Pollux and also

The brainchild of George Ellery Hale, the 200-inch Hale Telescope was dedicated June 3, 1948, at Palomar Observatory in California. In promoting and fundraising for the project, Hale had a firm science agenda for the scope, but also wrote more fancifully of “the lure of the uncharted seas of space”; though he died in 1938,

Looking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column.  June 2: Titan stands close to Saturn Asteroid 3 Juno is stationary at 3 P.M. EDT, standing still against the stars of Aquila the Eagle. The large main-belt world is in far eastern Aquila and doesn’t rise until an hour before midnight.