This article, originally titled "The Man Who Discovered the Universe," is from the Summer 2025 issue of Air & Space Quarterly ...

A star like the Sun lives modestly for billions of years, converting the nuclear fuel in its core into energy that ultimately escapes as light and heat. But the most spectacular phase of a Sun-like ...

The universe is a slow-changing place. While it's mostly true that the heavens and the deep-sky objects in it will look ...

Astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) New Technology Telescope (NTT) and the Hubble Space Telescope to explore more than 100 planetary nebulae in the central bulge of our ...

When a star runs out of fuel, it sheds its outer layers of gas and, if it doesn't explode in a supernova, forms a glowing shell of ionized gas that expands into space. Shells like these are known as ...

If you caught my previous column, you may have tried your hand at using the white-on-black sketching technique for deep-sky objects. Now it’s time to step it up a notch. The challenge isn’t always in ...

Compass needles? Astronomers have discovered something weird in the Milky Way's galactic bulge - a population of planetary nebula are all mysteriously pointing in the same direction. They noticed the ...

As we continue to break new ground in the field of cosmology, the importance of carefully categorizing the objects we see comes into focus. Part of this stems from the fact that, increasingly, we find ...

NASA, Donald Walter/South Carolina State University/Paul Scowen/ Brian Moore/Arizona State University A glimpse up at the night sky will reveal a seemingly endless landscape of twinkling stars, but ...

The final stages of life for a star like our Sun result in the star blowing its outer layers out into the surrounding space, forming objects known as planetary nebulae in a wide range of beautiful and ...

Planetary nebulae, formed when red giant stars exhaust their fuel, can sometimes be spectacular (see the Hourglass Nebula) but can also just be beautiful in their simplicity. Like this one — the Lemon ...