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A size comparison illustration showing Earth and the Moon side by side against a black background. Earth appears on the left, showing the Americas, swirling cloud cover, and blue oceans, while the gray, crater-marked Moon is shown to the right at roughly one-quarter of Earth's diameter, accurately reflecting their relative sizes.

How is the Moon 1% of Earth’s mass, but its gravity is 17% of Earth’s?

Night sky photograph taken through out-of-focus tree branches, which appear as blurred yellow-green shapes in the foreground. Several faint stars are visible in the deep blue sky, with one noticeably brighter point of light near the center of the frame.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from July 3 to 10: Mars and Uranus meet

Tall graphic showing a dark, jagged mountain range at the bottom under a bright, star-filled night sky. A wide, colorful band of the Milky Way stretches diagonally across the frame in blues, purples, and pinks against deep blue-black space. In front, two people appear in silhouette—one bent to look through a large telescope on a tripod, the other standing and holding up a phone toward the sky.

Telescopes and Equipment

How to buy your first telescope

Photograph showing the close conjunction of bright Venus with the star Regulus in Leo at dawn on October 3, 2020.

July 2026: What’s in the sky this month? Venus and Jupiter are visible in the evening, plus a conjunction of Mars and Uranus before dawn

Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins its Legacy Survey of Space and Time

Features, Science

Our planet’s electronic vulnerability

Human Spaceflight

Cracks in the International Space Station are causing air leaks – how much longer can it remain habitable?

A photograph of a full Moon glowing warm orange just above the rugged ridgeline of a rocky, tree-dotted mountain slope. The Moon's surface details are visible through its amber hue, and it is surrounded by a soft golden glow against a deep blue twilight sky.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from June 26 to July 3: A sweet June Strawberry Moon

Robotic Spaceflight

NASA’s Swift Boost mission delayed

Deep-Sky Objects

Summer observing targets for small telescopes

Stargazing under city lights

Deep-Sky Objects

Summer observing targets for large telescopes

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This artist’s conception illustrates one of the most primitive supermassive black holes known (central black dot) at the core of a young, star-rich galaxy. Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have uncovered two of these early objects, dating back to about 13 billion years ago. The monstrous black holes are among the most distant known, and appear to be in the very earliest stages of formation, earlier than any observed so far. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Science

Explore the science of space, from the astrophysics of stars to the ultimate fate of the universe.

Credit: Tim Doucette.

Observing

Learn about upcoming observing events such as eclipses, meteor showers, comets, conjunctions, and more.

This 2016 Curiosity rover selfie shows the vehicle at the “Okoruso” drilling site on Mount Sharp’s Naukluft Plateau. The Martian scene is a mosaic of images taken with the arm-mounted Mars Hands Lens Imager (MAHLI). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

Space Exploration

Human and robotic missions are helping humanity explore our solar system and beyond.

Sky This Week

Night sky photograph taken through out-of-focus tree branches, which appear as blurred yellow-green shapes in the foreground. Several faint stars are visible in the deep blue sky, with one noticeably brighter point of light near the center of the frame.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from July 3 to 10: Mars and Uranus meet

Sky This Month

Photograph showing the close conjunction of bright Venus with the star Regulus in Leo at dawn on October 3, 2020.

July 2026: What’s in the sky this month? Venus and Jupiter are visible in the evening, plus a conjunction of Mars and Uranus before dawn

Picture of the Day

Rings within rings

Warren Keller/Mike Selby, taken from Observatorio El Sauce, Chile

NGC 7098 is a barred spiral galaxy around 100 million light-years away in the southern constellation Octans. Its unusual double-ring structure — a bright bar wrapped by an inner ring of tightly wound arms and a fainter outer ring — stands out against a deep field strewn with far more distant background galaxies. The picture combines a total of 23 hours of LRGB exposure: 11 hours of luminance on a 1-meter f/6.8 scope and four hours in each color on a 28-inch scope.

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