Follow the foot traffic. Sidewalk astronomers often set up at street fairs, outdoor events, nightlife hotspots, or by any venue where a lot of people tend to pass by. If you want to set up at an event ...

In the time it takes our planet to go around the Sun, we do a lot of exploring. This year, new missions took off, a powerful observatory began examining the sky, and seasoned spacecraft kept up their ...

Did you know that the Moon looks different from Earth’s northern and southern hemispheres? Someone looking at the Moon from our north pole would see it upside down compared to someone seeing it from ...

The odds of there being other planets like Earth in the Universe are heavily stacked in our favor. If every planet in our galaxy were the size of a basketball, you could stretch them in a line from ...

What happens when scientists fundamentally disagree about planetary bodies? It happens more often than you might think. These disagreements are often fundamental: How did the Moon get its craters?

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is one of the most daring missions in the Solar System. Led by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, the mission made history in 2021 when it became the ...

If you’re getting ready to witness an eclipse, you’ll encounter some vocabulary that you might not know. Here is your complete guide to the terminology used to talk about total solar eclipses, partial ...

In February 2026, Jennifer Vaughn took the helm as chief executive officer of The Planetary Society. Jenn first joined the Society’s staff in 1997 as an editorial assistant for The Planetary Report, ...

Should I be worried about asteroids hitting Earth? You shouldn’t lose sleep over it. Damaging asteroids do not hit Earth very often. But you should care about it, because dangerous asteroids have ...

We’re not the only world with dazzling auroras. Moons, planets, and even comets can have their own light shows, and some are very different from what we have on Earth. Auroras can be big or small, ...

When an astrobiologist says “life is hard,” they may be speaking on a cosmic level. They could mean that life itself is a puzzle we are nowhere near solving. “We’re like second graders when it comes ...