Over the past 15 years, cities at night around the world have undergone a transformation: instead of being bathed in warm, orange sodium vapor light, they're now lit up by brighter, white LED lights.
The latest ESA/Webb Picture of the Month captures the irregular galaxy Arp 263 in infrared light, showing the very odd final phase of a long-past galactic merger.
Photographers don't always need to go to great lengths for great pictures; sometimes it's about making the most of where you are. Case in point: Andrew McCarthy's latest shot of a Blood Moon eclipse.
NASA's cutting-edge Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched this morning aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, beginning a million-mile journey with the goal of solving some of the many mysteries of dark energy and the origins of the Universe itself.
A photo taken by the Mars Curiosity Rover a few years ago has resurfaced online, and that's because it shows something strange on the horizon.
DJI mounted an Osmo Action 6 camera to a rocket ship, filming its ascent into near-space and back down again.
New satellite images show an ice island about the size of Manhattan breaking away from a Greenland glacier, marking the largest loss of floating ice there in over 10 years.
60 years ago, a robotic spacecraft captured the first Earthrise photo -- a stunning view that the Artemis II crew recreated earlier this year.
DarkSky International's Capture the Dark 2026 photo contest undoubtedly featured some beautiful photos of the night sky captured by talented photographers. However, since the winners were unveiled last week, controversy has reared its ugly head.
The atmosphere-less Moon is frequently bombarded by meteors, asteroids, and comets, and now it can add another item to that list: SpaceX rockets.
DarkSky International has announced the winners of its nighttime photography contest, Capture the Dark 2026. This year's contest, its sixth annual edition, drew a record number of entries from photographers in over 30 countries.
Satellites captured the August 12, 2026 total solar eclipse in spectacular fashion.
Photographers from all over the world traveled to Europe last night for a stunning total solar eclipse.
Although fortunate photographers in a narrow swath of Europe are being treated to a total solar eclipse today, everyone in the Northern Hemisphere (and the very northern part of the Southern Hemisphere) can enjoy the annual Perseids Meteor Shower right now. The meteor shower peaks tonight.
Nearly 49 years after it launched into space aboard a Titan III rocket, NASA's Voyager 2 space probe received yet another software update, this time reaching the speeding probe from nearly 13.3 billion miles (almost 21.4 billion kilometers) away.
Scientists have used a pair of NSF NOIRLab telescopes for 13 years to create the new DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys map. It is the largest 2D map ever of the Universe and covers three-quarters of the sky. The catalog has nearly four billion objects.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured beautiful new photos of the Lion Nebula, NGC 2392, demonstrating its imaging prowess compared to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope.
The first photos of the impact crater left on the Moon after an out-of-control SpaceX spacecraft crashed into its surface last week have emerged.
The newest NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month delivers a spectacularly colorful look at a cosmic "Treasure Chest," a neat feature of the nearby Carina Nebula, located just 7,500 light-years away.
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z instrument to photograph Earth as it passed behind the Martian moon, Phobos.
Astronaut Don Pettit takes photos so good that people have a hard time believing they are real. Case in point, a stunning image of the Milky Way Galaxy as the Earth zooms below Pettit's International Space Station vantage point.
A NASA satellite has captured a striking image of a fractured Antarctic landscape that appears to resemble a hummingbird.
In March, the Einstein Probe, a satellite made by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in partnership with the European Space Agency, detected a very brief flash of "soft X-rays" emitted by a galaxy about 500 million light-years away. Within an hour, ground-based telescopes, including several at National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab facilities, began investigating the region, getting a front-row seat to bombastic and very special star death.
Astronaut Anil Menon has only been in space for less than one month, but he has already captured a mind-boggling photo showing a super typhoon brooding above the Pacific Ocean.
Trundling around on an alien planet some 140 million miles from Earth is the solar system's most intrepid landscape photographer, snapping awe-inspiring shots as it scrambles up a mountain that's inside a crater.
A new image from the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's 3200-megapixel LSST camera features hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies across its many pixels, delivering a spectacular view of one of the most observed patches of the Universe.
While NASA's Curiosity Mars rover routinely finds interesting-looking rocks, including ones that looked like dragon scales just a few months ago, its latest discovery in "Valle Grande" shows honeycomb-like rocks at a never-before-seen scale.
While the news flew under my radar a bit, Vaonis recently unveiled its next generation of smart telescopes for astrophotographers: the Vespera 3 and the Vespera Pro 2. Each smart telescope promises exciting upgrades for astronomy enthusiasts and improved imaging capabilities.
An astronomer claims that existing proposals for 1.7 million satellites, including incredibly bright ones, will have "devastating consequences" for humanity's view of the Universe.
Photographer AJ Smadi has captured the second-ever photograph of the International Space Station (ISS) and Venus in the same frame -- he also captured the first one.
This week marked the 50th anniversary of the NASA Viking 1 spacecraft landing safely on Mars, spearheading a new era of space exploration. Just minutes after Viking 1 landed on the Red Planet, it captured a photo, the first ever taken on the surface of Mars and the first time any human had ever seen a photo from another planet.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered a giant planet, hiding in plain sight just outside the solar system.
Throughout May, NASA's Psyche spacecraft approached and flew away from Mars, coming within just 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the Red Planet during its closest approach. A brand-new timelapse video released by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) features thousands of images that Psyche captured during its mission.
Picture this: you're photographing in the middle of the night, it's dark, and you desperately need light. So, you whip out your phone, open an app, pay some money, and boom, night becomes day thanks to a satellite in the sky that is now reflecting sunlight to your location like a bright full Moon.
When Joël Lapointe was planning an epic camping trip through the Côte-Nord region of Quebec on Google Maps, an area gave him pause for thought: it looked like a giant meteor crater.
The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) pointed its 570-megapixel CCD image sensor, housed inside the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope, at the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, one of the nearest star-forming regions to Earth.
NASA photographer Jim Ross recently flew over Washington, D.C. while seated in an F-18 aircraft and took photos of the capital on America's 250th birthday.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is celebrating its fourth birthday today, and like PetaPixel did two years ago, it's the perfect opportunity to look at the 25 best space photos Webb has captured thus far.
I have loved LEGO since I was a child, just coming to grips with fine motor control. I have loved space nearly as long. So imagine my delight when LEGO unveiled a Hubble Space Telescope set today.
To celebrate the James Webb Space Telescope's fourth anniversary of scientific operations, NASA, ESA, and CSA have unveiled new photos of a familiar galaxy that illustrate just how special Webb's imaging systems are. The new images showcase Webb's exceptional ability to peer through cosmic dust and unravel the mysteries of the Universe.
The Japanese space agency has captured a remarkable image of a double-headed asteroid some 62 million miles (100 million kilometers) from Earth.
While NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers continue to do incredible work on Mars, NASA is in advanced testing of its next rover, ERNEST.
A filmmaker has created a beautiful timelapse from photos taken by astronauts onboard the International Space Station.
In celebration of the United States of America's 250th birthday, NASA has unveiled four new images from its Chandra X-ray Observatory that show the wonders of the Universe in resplendent red, white, and blue.
Researchers at Tokyo City University just published a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters based on photos the Artemis II astronauts captured in space during their lunar flyby using the Nikon Z9. The researchers analyzed the solar corona images captured by the Artemis II astronauts, yielding new insights into the Sun's coronal structure and demonstrating the value of taking cameras into space.
ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot (@soph_astro) was recently treated to incredible, dazzling aurora displays in space while aboard the International Space Station (ISS). While Adenot and the ESA shared photos last month, Adenot just shared an incredible video of auroras from space on social media today.
The Royal Observatory Greenwich has announced the shortlist for its annual ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. This year's edition received nearly 4,000 entries from dedicated amateur and professional photographers from 66 different countries.
The monumental Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially begun, launching a 10-year mission that marks a new era in astronomy.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is still going strong and delivering unbelievably beautiful deep-space images. The latest Hubble image shows globular cluster NGC 6723, sometimes called the Chandelier Cluster. This name is well-earned, as it is an extremely dense stellar cluster, each star looking a little light on a giant cosmic chandelier.
A Game Boy enthusiast recently took his classic 1998 console to Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles and attached it to an enormous 60-inch telescope.
