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A daytime photograph of a crescent Moon visible against a clear blue sky. A bright point of light — a planet being occulted — is caught just above the Moon's illuminated limb moments before disappearing behind it, with the ghostly outline of the Moon's full disk faintly visible through earthshine.

Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from June 5 to 12: Jupiter and Venus meet

$A curved, icy surface stretches across the lower portion of the frame, with multiple bright jets of vapor and particles erupting upward into a black sky from the moon's fractured southern terrain.$

Alien Life

Scientists used a method from ecology to identify whether icy moons could hold conditions for life

No matter how many Full Moons appear in any given timespan, its color will not actually change to blue. Credit: John Chumack.

Observing, The Moon

What is a Blue Moon? When’s the next one?

Alien Life

Could aliens ever visit Earth?

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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.

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Observing

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

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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.

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June 2026

Untangling the cosmic web
Our planet’s electronic vulnerability
How to observe the night sky under city lights
Capturing the night sky in Kyrgyzstan

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Sky This Week

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Sky This Week, The Sky This Week

The Sky This Week from June 12 to 19: A daytime occultation of Venus

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Two bright planets — Venus and Jupiter — shine as close points of light in a deep blue twilight sky above an illuminated city skyline at dusk. The city's skyscrapers, tower, and sprawling lights glow against a gradient sky that fades from deep blue above to lighter blue near the horizon, with low clouds hugging the rooftops.

Observing

June 2026: What’s in the sky this month? Venus and Jupiter have a spectacular conjunction, and the Moon occults Venus

Picture of the Day

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$Wide-field view of a rich starfield showing a bright, dense globular star cluster near the upper right and a complex blue nebula with dark dust lanes in the lower left. The globular cluster appears as a tight, glowing ball of countless tiny white stars fading smoothly into the surrounding field. The lower-left nebula is made of bright blue patches around a few standout stars, crossed by thick, irregular dark clouds that block the stars behind them, while the rest of the frame is sprinkled with stars of different brightness and color, including a few very bright stars with sharp diffraction spikes.$

A glob and a stellar nursery

Massimo Di Fusco, taken via Chilescope

NGC 6727 is a reflection nebula and star-forming region in Corona Australis, part of the larger Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. It is accompanied in this image by globular cluster NGC 6723, sometimes called the Chandelier Cluster. This wide-field portrait combines 54 minutes of RGB exposure with a 20-inch f/3.8 scope.