Comet 19P/Borrelly is presently the brightest and best looking comet on show at mid-northern latitudes. It passes through perihelion passage on Tuesday, 1 February, when it lies around 195.4 million kilometres (1.306 AU) from the Sun.
At the start of February, Venus is a brilliant and beautiful ‘morning star’ that’s reasonably well placed in the pre-dawn sky on the south-eastern horizon.
The MeerKAT radio telescope has produced a stunning mosaic of the Milky Way’s central regions, providing a new view of known and newly-discovered phenomena.
The James Webb Space Telescope slips into orbit around Lagrange Point 2, setting the stage for the next critical step in its commissioning: mirror alignment.
Rippling sand dunes across the floor of a martian crater provide an intriguing backdrop for map makers using the depression to identify zero longitude on the red planet.
The Hubble Space Telescope is adept at spotting supernova blasts in remote galaxies, helping astronomers pin down the cosmic distance scale. Galaxy NGC 976 it a typically spectacular example of a Hubble target.
Two weeks after its Christmas Day launch, engineers completed the James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror deployment, clearing the way for alignment and focusing.
The Flame Nebula in Orion, photobombed by the Horsehead Nebula, blazes in a newly processed image captured by the SuperCam instrument at the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment.