The Dragon spacecraft finally set off to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning. On Friday, Dragon docked with the ISS and NASA streamed it live. If you want to relive the disappointment/excitement take a look at the NASA coverage. In the run up to the launch, WIRED had a series of Q&As with experts [...]

When the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon this Sunday, for many observers across much of the world it will be temporarily replaced by a beautiful ring of fire – a brilliant annulus of stellar plasma just peeking out around the dark lunar disk. This doesn’t always happen, partial solar eclipses merely trim away a [...]

Yesterday’s total solar eclipse, the last until 2015, was visible to precious few. The path of the total eclipse barely skimmed northern Australia and otherwise fell only on the South Pacific Ocean. A far greater number of sky-watchers were treated to a partial solar eclipse, in which the moon covers only a portion of the [...]

This time-lapse video of Sunday’s solar eclipse highlights the Sun’s outer layers: The photographer Cory Poole constructed the video by pasting together 700 photographs taken with a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stack telescope. According to Jason Kottke, Poole used a filter that only allows light from hydrogen atoms moving from the 2nd excited state [...]

A near-perfect alignment of the sun, the moon and Earth will provide sky watchers a generous holiday gift on the night of December 20 and the morning of December 21. If they can stay up late enough, North Americans should be able to witness—weather permitting—a prolonged total lunar eclipse, the first since February 2008. A [...]