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It is one of the great stories in the Korean royal tradition. A young princess named Deokman is brought a painting of peonies by her...

Astronomy is the sifting science. Its practitioners rake the sky, star by star, collecting and cataloguing, and when they are done, they...

When Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) rewrote our conception of how heavenly bodies move by replacing the ideal and eternal circles of...

Before, ‘The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be,’ there was, ‘The stars belong to everyone,’ the...

There is a bit of political wisdom we have lived with for half a century now, which says that spending money on space travel, while...

For a half century after the discovery of Pluto in 1930, the common wisdom was that it was the last, furthest member of our solar system,...

Sometimes the hardest thing about living in the universe is knowing about it. There is real and true terror to be faced in the...

In the 1860s and 1870s, women’s access to advanced astronomical instruction in the United States took a sudden and majestic turn for the...

For a solid century and a half, from Mary Somerville’s The Mechanism of the Heavens of 1830 to Helen Sawyer Hogg’s final With the Stars...

350,000 stars classified. It's one of astronomy’s unbreakable and frankly not even approachable records, the scientific equivalent of the...

When William Huggins became the first human to examine the spectrum of a star in 1864, he could little have imagined the magnitude of the...

If anybody embodies the spirit of Helen Sawyer Hogg’s mantra that The Stars Are For Everybody, it is Hisako Koyama (1916–1997), who built...

In the early nineteenth century nothing about the island of Nantucket made sense. It was simultaneously a hotbed of Quakerism and of the...

In 2092, if there are still humans on our planet to look and to see, a comet will appear in the night sky that has not been viewed since...

The history of science boasts a robust roster of Vanished Women, wives and sisters who did the work of full partners but received the...

‘It is I, Sea Gull!’ The words, full of meaning both personal for the speaker and cultural for the country listening below, were the...

In March of 1944, a physicist and radar specialist named Ruby Payne-Scott aimed her equipment at the sky and became the world’s first...

‘You are young, and wrong. You must retract.’ When fresh-faced zeal confronts experience, it usually loses. Scientists who think they’ve...

It is an image to inspire almost primordial awe, taken when a space telescope with a rocky past pointed itself towards a black expanse of...

If you had asked a random astronomer in the 1930s how all of the elements in the universe were produced, they would have had a ready and...