Don’t miss Venus shine beside the crescent moon at sunset tonight

NeRD

Look west at sunset on Sept. 13 to see brilliant Venus shining close to the delicate arc of the crescent moon. The encounter is a prelude to an even closer meeting the following day, when the moon will pass directly in front of Venus for observers across parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. Tonight (Sept. 13), Venus will appear as a bright “Evening Star,” a little over 5 degrees from the 9%-illuminated waxing moon — roughly the width of your three middle fingers held at arm’s length against the evening…

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APOD: 2026 September 13 – Comet NEOWISE Rising over the Adriatic Sea

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 13 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Comet NEOWISE Rising Over the Adriatic Sea Explanation: This sight was worth getting out of bed early. Just over four years…

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On this day in space! NASA astronaut Mae Jemison makes history as the 1st Black woman in space

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On Sept. 12, 1992, NASA astronaut Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to go to space. In NASA’s early days, women and people of color were never selected to go to space. NASA didn’t send a woman to space until the seventh space shuttle mission in 1983. NASA launched the first Black man in space, astronaut Guion Bluford, on the following mission that same year. But it would take another nine years for NASA to finally select a Black woman to fly on STS-47, the 50th space shuttle…

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Trump is proposing a US Space Academy — if created, it could blur the lines between NASA and the military (op-ed)

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. During a visit to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Aug. 28, 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a United States Space Academy The proposal, which would establish a NASA-led institution set up along the lines of a military academy, is a new one. As a space policy expert, I see several open questions and potential problems related to the vision Trump’s executive order described.…

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NASA, IBM launch new AI model for studying the moon

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We’ve been studying the moon for a long time. NASA has gathered mountains of data over decades of lunar missions and studies. The data collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) alone, for example, exceeds that of all NASA’s other planetary missions combined. Analyzing all this information takes lots of time and effort from researchers. So, NASA and IBM have developed an AI model to help sift through the moon data — an advance the agency announced on Thursday (Sept. 10). The open-source model, called the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model,…

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Help Refine Data from Space Telescopes with Artifact InSPECtor

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Explore This Section Science Citizen Science Help Refine Data from Space… Overview Resources Opportunities Citizen Science Highlights About Science Activation   How do scientists studying space with data from a telescope hundreds of thousands of miles away know that what they are seeing is real? A new NASA project, Artifact InSPECtor, invites you to find out – and by doing so, to help missions like Euclid and NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope answer fundamental questions about our universe. “It’s really cool that we can help teach computers new…

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NASA’s Chandra Spots Galactic Gem

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X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and J. Major Two galaxies merge at a furious rate in this Aug. 25, 2026, image of the II Zw 096 system. This and several other images of both visually and scientifically interesting galaxies were released by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes. Chandra X-ray data (magenta) pinpoint powerful black hole activity and hot gas, while optical data (blue and white) from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope illuminate vast stellar nurseries…

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NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 to Discuss Station Mission, Upcoming Return

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NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 members suit up in the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of launch to the International Space Station on Feb. 13, 2026. From left, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett Media are invited to hear from NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 astronauts during a news conference beginning at 2:45 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, Sept. 16, from the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir…

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NASA Boosts Open Science, Data Sharing with Artemis Accords

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Poynting crater and Keeler crater are visible side by side in the lower right portion of this image of the Moon’s far side highlands. Poynting, positioned above, is a large impact crater with a well-defined rim and relatively smooth interior, indicative of material that has settled following the initial impact. Just below it, Keeler crater appears slightly smaller, with a sharply outlined rim and a more textured interior shaped by subsequent impacts and ejecta. Both features lie within the densely cratered far side highlands, preserving a record of ancient impacts…

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Scientists discover mysterious new X-ray objects ‘unlike any they have seen before’

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NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object – compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies – four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). “We’ve never encountered a group of objects that act like this,” said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in…

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