The waxing gibbous Moon passes close by the Solar System’s largest planet, Jupiter, on the nights of March 2nd and 3rd. Jupiter was at opposition last month, but it’s still big, bright and offers much to see in a telescope.
Observers with a clear western horizon from the middle to the third week of February can enjoy the closing gap between planets Mars and Venus in the early evening sky.
NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, working well past their expected lifetimes, could be shut down in fiscal year 2016 as the agency tries to balance funding for older missions and development of modernised new space probes, officials said Monday.
The current monthly cycle featuring occultations of naked-eye star Lambda Geminorum continues with an early evening event for the British Isles on Sunday, 1st February.
On the evening of Thursday, 29 January the Moon has a close brush with bright star Aldebaran in Taurus. If you have a clear sky, grab your binoculars and enjoy the view.
For those in the west of the British Isles, magnitude-4.2 star θ Aquarii slips behind the darkened limb of the 2-day-old Moon soon after 7:15 pm — an event visible in binoculars.
What’s the youngest Moon you’ve ever seen? While the best opportunities generally occur in Northern Hemisphere spring when the ecliptic’s high, 21st January offers UK observers a 28-hour-old lunar crescent.
Ten years ago today, on 14 January 2005, a compact, flattened cylinder called Huygens, chock-full of sensors, cameras and scientific experiments, went hurtling through the orange skies of the mysterious moon Titan.
A decade ago, the Cassini probe made a New Year’s Eve close approach to Saturn’s moon Iapetus and captured astonishing views of its remarkable surface.