The Trifid Nebula (M20) is the trifecta of deep-sky objects: It combines a blue reflection nebula with an emission nebula glowing in red Hydrogen-alpha (Hα) light, all divvied up by opaque lanes of ...

Emission nebulae are the subject of many of the most spectacular astrophotographs published in the last decade. Although there are many subcategories of nebulae, they all consist of interstellar gas ...

July’s night skies are legendary for their sheer abundance of celestial objects such as immense star clouds, light and dark nebulae, crowded clusters and oddities. Daniel Zantzinger / Skywatcher's ...

Look up to the sky with the unaided eye and you’ll see lots of specks and globs that look mostly like stars. On closer inspection, though, some of those dots refuse to resolve, smeared out on the ...

NASA has released a breathtaking gallery of images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, showcasing celestial objects contained in the Messier catalog. The Messier collection was initially compiled ...

Last year, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers made the startling discovery of some free-floating, planetary-mass objects in the Orion nebula that threw their ideas of planet and ...

The constellation Auriga (pronounced or-EYE-guh) the Charioteer, a star pattern known by this name for several thousand years, is easy to recognize primarily because of its brightest star, Capella ...

When astronomer Charles Messier was chasing comets with his telescope in the late 1700s, he kept bumping into nebulae, galaxies, and star clusters that confounded the hunt—so he started keeping a list ...

Since we’ve determined that not all of the fuzzy patches in the night sky are comets, that does leave us with a burning question — if not a comet, then what? As astronomers have learned over time, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. It’s one of the most common words used by astronomers—and ...