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Astronomy in November 2025

Wednesday, November 5, 2025 by Richard Harris

This month offers a bit of everything: a once-in-a-lifetime interstellar visitor passing through, a brilliant supermoon lighting up the sky, two bright comets fading out after their October glory, planets dancing in interesting ways, and even a couple of meteor showers (plus the promise of the auroras glimmering for those far north). It&rsq...

See Mercury early morning August 2025

Sunday, August 17, 2025 by Richard Harris

Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun every 88 days. Its swift journey around the sun means that it often appears close to the sun in our sky, making it challenging to observe. Mercury passes between Earth and the sun approximately every 116 days, a position known as inferior conjunction. During this time, Mercury is lost in the ...

Astronomy Picture of the Day

2026-04-03

Caught in the Web: Visualization of a Black Hole Merger in the Tarantula Nebula

Image Credit: Carl Knox

How can we see what is invisible? Black holes are not easy to see in the dark cosmic night, but astronomers can find them by analyzing their gravitational effects on matter, light and spacetime. The featured image shows an illustration that combines a simulation of a black hole binary system in its final "death-dance" with an astrophotography image of the Tarantula Nebula in the background. Even though black holes don't emit light, they distort the path of light rays, acting like a gravitational lens. As a result, the nebula appears extremely distorted, forming Einstein rings and multiple images. Tarantula Nebula lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is one of the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, 160,000 light-years away. That is more than 1,000 times closer than any of the binary black hole mergers detected so far. We'll probably never detect a merger so close to home!