Stories by Phil Plait

Thousands of spacecraft circle Earth. Seeing them from the ground is surprisingly easy—and a lot of fun

Apollo moon landing conspiracy theories were early hints of the dangerous anti-vax, antiscience beliefs backed by politicians today

Earth is bombarded by millions of bits of cosmic debris every day. Here’s how to distinguish between the different types

Yellow, white or maybe even green—the sun’s hue depends on how you see it

From dim red to brilliant blue, stellar colors span the spectrum—and reveal how much any star brings the heat

If you want to make it through the trials and tribulations of Mercury in retrograde, it’s easy: don’t do anything. You’ll be fine

All you need to see one of the year’s best meteor showers is a clear, dark sky—and patience

Marvel for a moment at the Milky Way’s night-sky spectacle—and the scientific revolutions it has sparked

The “magnitude scale” for measuring stellar brightness also reveals the limits of naked-eye stargazing

This week—and any time there’s a new crescent moon—the lunar night is a little less dark, thanks to the bright reflected light of Earth

Get to know the stellar trio behind one of the most iconic sights in summer’s night sky

When looking for life in space, we should broaden our horizons

Our planet’s not-quite-circular orbit means that on July 6 we’ll be about 2.5 million kilometers farther from the sun than average—but we won’t feel any colder

The wildfire smoke that smothered the U.S. Northeast last week has surprising connections to astrophysics—and to the historic search for our place in the cosmos

Our planetary neighbor Venus becomes a brilliant beacon in the sky each time it reaches its greatest orbital distance from the sun

Cell-phone towers leak radio waves into space, but they’ll be tough for aliens to detect

Saturn’s surprisingly young rings and record-breaking bounty of moons make the planet a ripe target for springtime sky watchers

Launching a fleet of space telescopes is not the solution to the Starlink problem

We only have a few clues about where the sun was born. Some new ones point to a crowded origin story for our nearest star

Red dwarfs are dim bulbs but host more Earth-like planets than any other kind of star

How I learned to stop worrying and love the next Earth-threatening asteroid

The Lucy spacecraft and its target asteroids show that the way that we name discoveries matters

The Chelyabinsk asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmosphere 10 years ago, the largest impact in more than a century

Citizen scientists and researchers found that we are losing our view of the sky at an astonishing rate of almost 10 percent each year