Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What if you could see the entire sky -- all at once -- for an entire year? That, very nearly, is what is pictured here. Every 15 seconds during 2025, an all-sky camera took an image of the sky over the Netherlands. Central columns from these images were then aligned and combined to create the featured keogram, with January at the top, December at the bottom, and the middle of the night running vertically just left of center. What do we see? Most obviously, the daytime sky is mostly blue, while the nighttime sky is mostly black. The twelve light bands crossing the night sky are caused by the glow of the Moon. The thinnest part of the black hourglass shape occurs during the summer solstice, like today, when days are the longest, while the thickest part occurs at the winter solstice. Equinoxes can also be located in the keogram, for example the northern-spring equinox from one year ago is about three-quarters of the way up.

Bags of organic fertiliser adorn newly-planted fields against a backdrop of the Western Catchment in the Nilgiri mountains. Tamil Nadu, India.

Timothy A. Gonsalves, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

"Only a dad, but he gives his all
To smooth the way for his children small,
Doing, with courage stern and grim,
The deeds that his father did for him.
This is the line that for him I pen,
Only a dad, but the best of men"

Last Stanza from Edgard Guest's Poem "Only a Dad" See complete poem

June 21, 2026 -  A solstice is an event in which earth’s poles are most extremely inclined toward or away from the sun, at about 23.5 degrees. Solstices happen twice per year, June and December, marking the change of seasons to summer and winter. During the June solstice, the sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer at noon and it marks the Northern Hemisphere astronomical beginning of summer with the longest daylight. In the Southern Hemisphere, it marks the beginning of astronomical winter, with the day having the shortest period of daylight. More 

Steve Smith on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Venus is now appearing on the celestial stage as Earth's brilliant evening star, performing with the Moon, other wandering planets, and bright stars in western skies. For evening sky gazers on June 17, the celestial beacon rose after sunset close by a young, slender, crescent Moon. But from some locations the Moon could be seen to occult or pass in front of Venus. And from a backyard observatory in southern British Columbia, Canada, the lunar occultation was played out in daylight. This stunning telescopic snapshot captured a scene in dramatically cloudy skies, following Venus' hour long disappearance, as the evening star emerged beyond the bright lunar limb.

Photo by Debra Ceravolo

Flower of a Geranium sanguineum, bloody crane's-bill. Focus stack of 51 photos.

Agnes Monkelbaan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

By Arjan Stalpers on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the right of the tree, a foreground horizon rising from left to right, and clouds above the horizon. Differences include that the photograph was taken in mid-April earlier this year in Cascavel, Brazil, while the painting was composed in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889. The original Starry Night is considered by many to be one of the three most famous paintings in the world today and a statement about the wonders of the night sky. Today is (roughly) the anniversary of the morning that van Gogh saw the sky that he later painted in his version of Starry Night. Night Sky Jigsaw: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

Photo by Rodrigo Guerra, Original Painting: Vincent van Gogh

Alley on Escheckstraße (and part of the cuckoo clock trail), Schönwald im Schwarzwald, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.