This week’s naked-eye object is the Beehive Cluster in Cancer the Crab. Because this cluster is bright — magnitude 3.1 — it has acquired other proper names throughout history. Messier made it number ...

Northern Cepheus contains a strange nebula with a very long name. Gyulbudaghian's Nebula (JAI-al-boo-dag-ian) was discovered by Armenian astronomer Armen Gyulbudaghian in 1977 and its variability was ...

Few things are as captivating as a dark, star-filled sky. But the stars we see and enjoy don’t just “exist”; they all came into being long ago inside of massive clouds of gas and dust known as ...

Astrophotographer Ronald Brecher captured a haunting vista in July earlier this year, in which several deep-sky objects take on the collective appearance of a colossal cosmic shark hunting in the ...

In context: Astronomers have been observing the wheel-shaped nebula NGC 1514 for over three centuries. In 1790, William Herschel described it as the first deep-sky object that looked cloudy. Unlike ...

In the quiet darkness of his Mount Tabor backyard in Southeast Portland, Josh Romberg carefully points his 4-foot telescope at the North Star. Unlike amateur astronomers of decades past, he isn’t ...

Who knew you could get nearly Webb telescope-quality images of space from the comfort of your home? Bob Schiff’s been doing it for a year now with amazing results, using a motorized rig that tracks ...

Of all the objects that you can view through a telescope, some of the most stunning to behold are the planets in our solar system, and the galaxies that lie far beyond it. But if you want to see more ...

Levy, of the famous comet-hunting team Shoemaker-Levy, compiles a comprehensive catalog of objects which can be observed in all light conditions and usually with low-power equipment. Targeting novice ...

Coddington’s Nebula is an obscure, fuzzy object discovered by the American astronomer Edwin Coddington (1870–1950) in 1898. The popular name for this object is a misnomer; it’s actually a galaxy, and ...