How to Find the Ten Brightest Stars in the Night Sky
Carlyn Kranking Assistant Editor, Science and Innovation Beginning to familiarize yourself with the night sky can feel daunting—with so many pinpricks of light above, parsing the constellations or identifying individual stars can be a lofty task. One starting point is to learn to find the brightest ones. In a rural sky dense with stars, the […]
How to View the ‘Comet of the Century’ C/2023 A3
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish. C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS and considered “the comet of the century,” will appear in all its splendor in our sky during September and October 2024. Due to its characteristics, astronomers believe it will be exceptionally bright, similar to Halley’s […]
Starlink tests show how to save radio astronomy from satellites
A radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia J. Seymour/Green Bank Observatory Radio telescopes observing the cosmos face growing challenges because of electromagnetic interference from thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit. Now, experiments involving SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have shown how to virtually eliminate one form of this problem. As these kind […]
How to See the Conjunction Between Mars, Jupiter, and the Moon
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish. August has delivered many spectacular sights in the night sky: a supermoon, meteor showers, and supercharged auroras. Mars and Jupiter also currently appear unusually close together in the night sky, in what’s known as a conjunction. They appeared closest during the […]
Missed the Auroras in May? Here’s How to See Them Next Time
Carlyn Kranking Assistant Editor, Science and Innovation After an evening of trick-or-treating in Maplewood, Minnesota, on October 31, 2003, 4-year-old Vincent Ledvina and his family were heading home for the night. Suddenly, he noticed the sky was lit up in ethereal colors that were like nothing he had ever seen before. To Ledvina, as a […]
How to best see the 2024 Eta Aquariid meteor shower around Australia
In short: The Eta Aquariids meteor shower will peak on May 6, with early morning the best time to see them With just a sliver of moon visible, the sky will be darker, which will make it easier to see up to 21 meteors an hour The meteor shower is one of two caused by the […]
What to know for the total solar eclipse: Time, path of totality, eclipse glasses
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. CNN — Sky-gazers across North America are in for a treat on April 8 when a total solar eclipse will pass over Mexico, the United States and Canada. The event will be visible to millions — including 32 million […]
How to Convince Your Flat-Earth Friends the Earth Is Round
Illustration: Rhett Allain You can see that we have a right triangle with the hypotenuse equal to the distance from the observer’s eyes to the center of the Earth (R + h), with the other two sides being just R and the distance to the horizon (s). Using the Pythagorean theorem, we can solve for […]