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Elon Musk loves high-tech toys. The billionaire entrepreneur, who heads SpaceX and the electric-car company Tesla, unveiled a new line of flamethrowers for his tunneling project, The Boring Company, over the weekend with a wild Instagram video. In the 7-second video, Musk fires up the flamethrower; runs at the camera with a big, goofy smile […]

Dark, narrow streaks on Martian slopes such as these at Hale Crater are inferred to be formed b seasonal flow of wtaer on contemporary Mars. The streaks are roughly the length of a football field. A tiny life-seeking instrument could be packed on a future mission to Mars or the icy moons of Enceladus or […]

The rare Super Blue Blood Moon eclipse of Jan. 31 will thrill early-morning skywatchers around the world on Wednesday, but you’ll have plenty of ways to watch it if you don’t live in a region that will see totality . Skywatchers in California, western Canada, Hawaii, Alaska, Australia and eastern Asia should be able to […]

Astronaut Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency tries on a pair of spacesuit sleeves inside the Quest airlock of the International Space Station. NASA officials on Saturday (Jan. 27) postponed a planned spacewalk at the International Space Station this week after developing a software patch for a glitch that two astronauts had expected to […]

SpaceX will attempt the first launch of its new giant rocket, the Falcon Heavy, on Feb. 6, the company’s CEO Elon Musk said Saturday (Jan. 27). The much-anticipated maiden flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket will lift off from the historic Launch Pad 39A — the same one used for NASA’s Apollo moon missions and […]

The bright stars in the sky can be informally linked to form fun shapes called asterisms. Asterisms can use all of a constellation (Little Dipper), part of a constellation (Big Dipper), or draw from multiple constellations, such as the Winter Football asterism. The SkySafari 6 app has an option to highlight selected asterisms using orange […]

Many of us just got our first telescope over the holidays, and let’s face it — a telescope can be intimidating. It’s a machine. It needs to be cleaned, properly aligned and calibrated. Even when you get it all set up, how do you decide where to point it first, with the whole night sky […]

Will Kalif is a writer, webmaster, and an avid telescope enthusiast currently living in New England. He has worked a full career in a variety of fields including robotics, computers, and electronics. He has been passionate about telescopes and the wonders of the night sky ever since he received his first telescope as a teenager. […]

Early in the morning on Jan. 31, roughly half of Earth will be treated to a total lunar eclipse . As the moon moves through Earth’s shadow, it will slowly disappear from sight, only to re-emerge within a few hours. The celestial event provides an excellent opportunity to engage children and teenagers (and even adults) […]

The SES-14 communications satellite, shown here in an artist’s illustration, successfully deployed after its launch on an Ariane 5 rocket on Jan. 25, 2018, despite Arianespace losing contact with the rocket’s second stage. NASA’s atmosphere-watching GOLD mission is flying along with SES-14. The satellite company SES confirmed that its SES-14 communications satellite, which hosts an […]

Cosmosphere and NASA workers remove an Apollo-era mission control console from the simulation control room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for its delivery to the Kansas space museum on Thursday, Jan. 25, 2018. HOUSTON — The historic consoles used by NASA flight controllers to manage the first missions to land astronauts on the […]

A Russian Soyuz-FG rocket launches 5 satellites from Baikonur launch site on July 22, 2012, at 10:00 Moscow time. Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan has been the launch site for Soviet and Russian space missions since the beginning of space exploration in 1957. The first satellite and the first human flew into space from there. Today, […]

The crescent planet Neptune and its crescent moon Triton, as seen by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989. Triton is the largest of Neptune’s moons. Discovered in 1846 by British astronomer William Lassell — just weeks after Neptune itself was found — the moon showed some strange characteristics as astronomers learned more about it. To […]