When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. If you spend any time with astronomers, sooner or later, you'll hear them use the phrase "M" ...

Charles Messier was a French comet-hunter who occasionally spied objects masquerading as comets due to their fuzzy appearance through his small scope. But they didn’t move against the starry ...

For one brief stretch each spring, amateur astronomers attempt one of backyard astronomy’s most ambitious challenges: spotting an entire catalog of deep-sky objects in a single night. Known as the ...

Thanks to technological developments, we mere mortals can now see unimaginably distant places in unprecedented detail without leaving the comfort of our home. However, before there were ...

In a nod to the global amateur astronomy community, as well as to any space enthusiast who enjoys the beauty of the cosmos, the Hubble Space Telescope mission is releasing its version of the popular ...

Amateur astronomers had 12 spectacular new images to look to during this year's Messier marathon, a skywatching challenge that happened on the weekend of March 17 and 18. Messier Marathons happen in ...

Back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries — long before anyone had any real idea of all that lay out there among the stars — a French astronomer spent his nights scouring the sky for his prey.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Photographer Alan Dyer observes the star clusters Messier 7 and Messier 6 near the horizon above Montana’s Sweetgrass Hills—two of ...