‘god’s hand’ interstellar cloud reaches for the stars

Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They can be broadly classified as spiral, elliptical or irregular, but each of these still leaves plenty of scope for variety. Take, for instance, the s

1 NGC 6624 We’ll start with globular cluster NGC 6624 located in the northwest corner of the Teapot, 0.8° southeast of mag. +2.7 Kaus Media (Delta (δ) Sagittarii). Shining with an integrated magnitude

Thirty years ago, on the evening of 23 July 1995, amateur astronomers Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp were both independently looking at the same globular star cluster. Experienced observers who knew the sk

On 23 July 1999, Space Shuttle Columbia launched its heaviest-ever payload: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a new flagship telescope for NASA. It is the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope, capable o

On 2 March, a spherical UFO was spotted making erratic zigzag movements over the city of Buga in Colombia. Shortly afterwards, a group of people recovered a metal sphere, roughly the size of a footbal

You’re woken in the middle of the night by an urgent phone call. An asteroid is headed straight for Earth and it’s your job to find out if it’ll strike the planet and rain destruction down upon us all