The exact timing of the new moon phase happens at 3:11 p.m. Eastern Time (1911 UTC), according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. The new phase of the moon is called that because in many lunar calendar systems, it marks the start of the month. At that time, the sun and moon are in conjunction, meaning they share the same celestial longitude. Unless there is a solar eclipse, the moon itself isn't visible since it is so close to the sun and the illuminated side is facing away from Earth. (The next partial solar eclipse is due in September, and will be visible in the Southern Hemisphere).

The time of a given Lunar phase is measured by where the moon is relative to the Earth, which means any differences are because of one's time zone. For example, the new moon is at 8:11 p.m. in London, 9:11 p.m. in Paris, and 5:11 a.m. July 25 in Beijing.

Visible Planets

For mid-northern latitudes, Mercury will be in the evening sky July 24 but lost in the glare of the sun; the planet sets soon after the sun does – in New York sunset is at 8:19 p.m. and Mercury sets at 8:30 p.m.; the sky background will be too bright to see the planet.

Mars will be low in the southwest on July 24; in New York Mars sets at 10:32 p.m. By 9 p.m. the sky is getting darker and Mars is about 16 degrees high. It will still be a bit hard to spot as the sky will be relatively light – civil twilight ends at 8:50 p.m. Eastern – but the reddish color will help distinguish it from other objects and stars.

Saturn is the first planet to rise after Mars sets, at 10:56 p.m. on July 24 in New York City. As the planet is in the constellation Pisces, it will be quite distinct in its region of sky as Pisces is fainter and hard to see from city locations. As the sky starts to lighten by about 4:30 to 5:00 a.m. (the morning of July 25) it will be about 37 degrees above the south-southeastern horizon.

Following Saturn is Venus, rising in New York at 2:51 a.m. on July 25. Venus is in Taurus, and so bright that it is immediately identifiable; it will look like the brightest "star" in the sky. By about 4:30 a.m. it is prominent in the east-northeast, though still low in the sky at about 17 degrees in altitude.

Jupiter rises at 3:58 a.m. EDT in New York. Jupiter is in Gemini, though the constellation itself will be harder to see as the planet rises so close to sunrise (5:46 a.m.). Jupiter will appear to the left and below Venus.

In the Southern Hemisphere, for example in Melbourne, Australia, (where the new moon is on July 25 at 5:11 a.m.) it is winter, and the sun sets early; at 5:27 p.m. on the evening of July 25; civil twilight ends at 5:55 p.m. so by about 6:30 p.m. the sky is dark enough to see the stars. Mars will be in the northwest about 32 degrees high at that point, in the constellation Leo near the Lion's tail (appearing to be between Leo and Virgo). Mars sets at 9:31 p.m.

Saturn rises in Melbourne at 10:09 p.m. and will be in the east; if it is a dark sky location one can see a "circlet" of Pisces (one of the Fish) to the left of the planet as it rises. The planet transits at 4:16 a.m., and it will be 53 degrees high in the northern sky.

Venus rises in Melbourne at 4:46 a.m. July 26, and as sunrise isn't until 7:25 a.m. it will have a chance to get quite high in the northeast before it fades from view in the dawn light; by 7 a.m. the planet will still look like the "morning star" and be 20 degrees above the horizon.

Jupiter rises last, at 6:03 a.m. local time in Melbourne, and won't be as easy to spot as Venus but if one has an unobstructed horizon (for example one is looking out over a plain or the ocean) one will see Jupiter about 4 degrees high forming a triangle with Jupiter, Venus and Aldebaran being the bottom and making a line up and to the left, with Betelgeuse as the top point above and to the right of Venus.

Summer Stars

For Northern Hemisphere sky watchers, by about 10 p.m. the Summer Triangle is high in the eastern sky; the "top" star is Vega, the brightest star in Lyra the Lyre, and it is about 74 degrees above the horizon. By about 11:30 p.m. local time (in most mid-northern latitude locations) Vega is almost directly overhead, within a few degrees of the zenith from the continental United States. The other two stars in the Summer triangle are Deneb and Altair, both of which are east (to the left) of Vega; Deneb is the more northerly of the two and higher in the sky. From a dark sky site one can see the Milky Way inside the Triangle.

Deneb is the tail of Cygnus the Swan –its name is from the Arabic word for tail, dhaneb  —  and also contains an asterism called the Northern Cross. Cygnus has been associated with more than one legendary swan – one is the form Zeus took to seduce Leda (mother of the twins represented by Gemini) and the other is the form Orpheus was given after being murdered, with the constellation [placed in the sky near Lyra, his Lyre. Chinese astronomers saw Cygnus as the "Black Tortoise of the North."

Turning left – towards the north one will see the Big Dipper to the left (in the northwest) part of the sky. The Big Dipper is an asterism that is part of the Ursa Major, the Great Bear; the end of the Dipper's handle is in the Bear's tail. Following the "pointers" (the two stars in the front of the bowl of the Dipper, called Dubhe and Merak) one can make a line to the left to find Polaris, the Pole Star and the end of the tail for Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, also called the Little Dipper.

Continuing straight across one encounter Cepheus, the king, and just below Cepheus is the "W" shape of Cassiopeia, the Queen (Cepheus' wife) which will be a bit lower in the northeast.

Going back to the Dipper, follow the handle of the big dipper and "arc to Arcturus" the brightest star in Boötes, the herdsman, and continuing downward you hit Spica, the brightest star in Virgo. If you stay at Boötes, and look left of Arcturus and a bit up, one can see a circlet of stars anchored by a brighter one in the middle of the arc; this is Corona Boreallis, the Northern Crown.

Turning south, putting the Big Dipper and Polaris behind you, one sees the bright red star Antares, the heart of Scorpius, and in darker sky locations looking up (north) from Scorpio one sees Ophiuchus the healer, with Sagittarius and its "teapot" shape to the left of Scorpius.

In the mid-southern latitudes one sees the stars of winter. – darkness comes earlier. By 7 p.m. at the latitude of Buenos Aires, Melbourne or Cape Town, the sky is dark and Crux, the Southern Cross is high above the southern horizon, about 60 degrees. To the left of the Cross (east) is Hadar, the second brightest star in Centaurus, the Centaur, and to the left of that is Alpha Centauri, also called Rigil Kentaurus, our nearest stellar neighbor.

Centaurus is a constellation associated with Chiron, who according to legend was Hercules' tutor. Looking east one sees Scorpius, though upside-down (from the point of view of a Northern Hemisphere observer) with its brightest star Antares very high in the sky; a full 60 degrees in altitude. If one looks straight downward from Scorpius one encounters the teapot shape of stars that is Sagittarius; in mid southern latitudes the teapot shape is almost vertical.

Towards the southwest, looking downwards from the Southern Cross is a large circle of seven to eight stars (depending on how dark your local sky is, given city lights) which is Vela, the Ship's Sail. Below Vela is the ship's keel, Carina, setting and marked by Canopus, about 11 degrees above the southwestern horizon. Canopus is the second-brightest star in the night sky after Sirius. Vela and Carina are parts of what was once a giant constellation called Argo, the ship of Jason.

The "Neil Armstrong Space Prize" was announced by Purdue University on Sunday (July 20) — the 56th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing — at an event held in Washington, D.C. The honor is intended to share the same clout as the Nobel Prize, but for advancements in space exploration.

"This prize carries Armstrong's name and Purdue's space legacy," said Mung Chiang, president of Purdue University, in a statement released by the school. "We unveil the creation of a Nobel-level prize for space at a transformational time for the next giant leaps in space."

Eight out of Purdue's 22 living astronaut alums joined Chiang at the National Building Museum to help introduce the prize. The Indiana university has the distinction of being the alma matter for more astronauts than any other school (28 in total). The award's namesake, Neil Armstrong, received his undergraduate degree in aeronautical engineering from Purdue in 1955.

Led by seven-time space shuttle mission specialist Jerry Ross, the seven other astronauts at the event included fellow shuttle veterans Roy Bridges, Mark Polansky and Charlie Walker, as well as suborbital fliers Sirisha Bandla, Marc Eagle, Beth Moses and Audrey Powers.

Set to be bestowed for the first time next year, the Armstrong Prize will be awarded in three categories: technologies that improve life on Earth, discoveries that increase our knowledge about the universe and achievements in space exploration that inspire future achievements.

Nominations for individuals or teams to receive the inaugural prize will be accepted beginning in August through Nov. 1, 2025.

The selection committee includes former NASA associate administrator Jim Free, SpaceX Starbase manager Kathy Lueders, former president of Blue Origin Rob Meyerson and the former head of NASA's science division Thomas Zurbuchen. The panel is chaired by Dan Dumbacher, professor of engineering practice at Purdue.

"At a time when space is more accessible than ever, this award aims to inspire the next generation of space leaders while highlighting Purdue's enduring role in space research, exploration, security and partnerships with NASA, the U.S. Space Force and the commercial space sector," said Arvind Raman, the John A. Edwardson Dean of Purdue's College of Engineering.

Our solar system orbits within a 100,000-light-year-wide spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way. On clear nights under dark skies, we can see the profile of our galactic home from within — the galactic plane — stretching across the inky darkness as a glowing band of milky light interspersed with dense filaments of cosmic clouds.

Different aspects of the Milky Way become visible to us as Earth makes its year-long circuit around the sun. In the warm summer months of July and August, viewers in the northern hemisphere can gaze directly towards the core of our galaxy, while the winter months give us a better view of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way.

From a dark sky site, viewers in the northern hemisphere will see the ribbon-like form of our galaxy stretching towards the southern horizon, passing through the constellations of Cygnus and Aquila, before tumbling towards the southern horizon past Sagittarius and the tail of Scorpius.

How to photograph the Milky Way

We asked award winning astrophotographer Josh Dury for some tips on capturing the Milky Way. "When photographing the milky way, it is best to photograph its presence amongst the night-sky from dark-sky locations," Dury told Space.com in an email. "Not only will this result in more contrast and brighter appearance, [but] there are more details to see in the structure of the galactic core and further afield."

Our galaxy will make for a particularly splendid sight on the dark nights surrounding the new moon phase on July 24, at which time the moon appears during the day alongside the sun, leaving the nights blissfully dark for viewing the ancient light of the galactic plane.

Stargazers hoping to get the best view of the Milky Way should head out a few hours after sunset and allow at least half an hour for their eyes to acclimatise to the dark. Observing from a dark sky location will help reveal the true glory of our galaxy, so be sure to check out a website like darksky.org to find the best spot near you.

"Deploy the Milky Way creatively within your image. Think about the context of the image and how the inclusion of the Milky Way can lend itself to your subject matter, framing and story," explained Dury. "Let as much light into your camera that is technically possible, but do not over do it on the ISO - this will result in a grainy image and harder to resolve finer detail."

Further advice on capturing the Milky Way and a range of other night sky targets can be found in Dury's first book, '52 Assignments: Night Photography', which was released earlier this year and can now be purchased through Amazon.com.

Photographers looking to upgrade their gear should check out our guide to the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography in 2025. Those looking for a closer view of the night sky should also read our roundups of the top telescopes and binoculars for exploring the post-sunset realm.

Editor's Note: If you capture an image of the Milky Way and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s) and name alongside your comments and shooting location to spacephotos@space.com.

Look east around 4 a.m. local time, just before dawn, to see the slender form of the crescent moon climb above the horizon. Jupiter, appearing as a bright "star" will sit about 5 degrees to the right of the moon — roughly the combined width of your index, middle and ring fingers held at arms length against the night sky!

Venus will shine to the upper right of Jupiter in the pre-dawn sky, forming a fleeting cosmic triangle with the red supergiant star Betelgeuse, which will appear low on the eastern horizon before vanishing in the light of the rising sun.

A telescope with an aperture of 6 inches or more will allow viewers to observe Jupiter's four brightest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, as well as the planet's gargantuan banded cloud layers. However, care must be taken to never point a telescope or binoculars in the direction of the rising sun, as doing so could result in a permanent loss of vision.

On the nights surrounding the new moon on July 24, you might notice a soft light suffusing the lunar disk This phenomenon, often referred to as Earthshine or the 'Da Vinci Glow', occurs when sunlight bounces off Earth and illuminates the moon's nightside and is often visible when the moon is a thin crescent.

This gentle glow reveals the vast basaltic plains of the lunar seas darkening swathes of the lunar surface. The formations were created billions of years ago when ancient lava flows flooded a network of gigantic impact basins left behind by cataclysmic asteroid strikes, which later hardened to renew the lunar surface.

The dark nights on either side of the new moon phase present a perfect opportunity to spot the diffuse light cast by the Pleiades open star cluster — a gravitationally bound collection of over 1,000 stellar bodies that orbits within the Milky Way some 410 light-years from Earth. The Pleiades will be visible as a hazy smudge of light from a dark sky location to the upper right of Venus on the night of July 23. A pair of 10x50 binoculars will allow viewers to pick out the most prominent of the blue-white stars, while a small telescope will help resolve a far greater number.

Stargazers hoping to explore the wonders of the night sky should read our guide to the top telescopes and binoculars available in 2025. Those new to the hobby should also check out our roundup of the best smartphone astronomy apps, which use augmented reality technology to pinpoint the locations of the stars, constellations, planets and deep sky objects that populate the night sky.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The proposed mission, called CosmoCube, aims to "listen" for these ancient signals from the far side of the moon. It will target the "cosmic dark ages" — a critical-but-mysterious era roughly 50 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars, galaxies and black holes in the universe formed.

"It's incredible how far these radio waves have travelled, now arriving with news of the universe's history," David Bacon, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. who's involved with the mission, said in a statement. "The next step is to go to the quieter side of the moon to hear that news."

Observing this distant epoch is notoriously difficult, astronomers say. At that time, the universe was filled with a dense fog of neutral hydrogen gas that blocked visible light from traveling freely through space, rendering the early cosmos opaque.

However, hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the universe, emits a characteristic radio signal at a frequency of 1,420 megahertz, corresponding to a wavelength of about 8.3 inches (21 centimeters). As the first luminous objects ignited, they subtly transformed the hydrogen around them, altering the strength and profile of this signal. Capturing these variations could offer a pristine view into how the first luminous objects formed, according to the statement.

While this signal has been studied extensively in the nearby universe, detecting its much fainter counterpart from the universe's earliest days is far more challenging. Capturing these ancient signals requires near-total radio silence, which is virtually impossible to achieve on Earth, where electronic devices and atmospheric interference create a constant background hum.

"It's like trying to hear that whisper while a loud concert is playing next door," Eloy de Lera Acedo, an associate professor of radio cosmology at the University of Cambridge who's involved with the CosmoCube mission, said in the statement. "This makes it really hard to pick up those faint signals from billions of years ago."

The CosmoCube mission would take advantage of the moon's far side, which acts as a natural shield from Earth's radio emissions, according to the statement. From this unique vantage point, the probe aims to deploy a sensitive radiometer designed to detect low-frequency radio signals.

The mission data could also help to resolve the Hubble tension, the long-standing puzzle in cosmology involving conflicting measurements of the universe's expansion rate based on observations of the early universe versus the local universe.

Lab prototypes of the instruments are already undergoing environmental testing. The team plans to launch CosmoCube within the next four to five years, with the goal of reaching lunar orbit by the end of the decade, the team said in the statement.

The nation wants to build a moon base by 2045, The Korea Times reported on Thursday (July 17), citing a long-term exploration road map that the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) laid out that same day during a hearing at the National Research Foundation of Korea in Daejeon.

That road map "outlines five core missions, including low Earth orbit and microgravity exploration, lunar exploration, and solar and space science missions," The Korea Times wrote.

KASA, which was established just last year, aims to develop homegrown lunar landing and roving technology, as well as the ability to extract and exploit moon resources such as water ice.

Some of this work is already underway. For example, the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources recently deployed prototype lunar rovers in an abandoned coal mine, testing tech that could be used for space mining down the road.

And South Korea already has some experience at and around the moon. In August 2022, the nation launched its first moon probe — called the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter or Danuri — atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Danuri reached lunar orbit four months later and is still going strong, studying the moon with its suite of instruments.

South Korea had already been aiming for the lunar surface; officials have said they want to put a robotic lander on the moon by 2032. But the newly revealed road map ups the ante. The nation plans to develop a new, presumably more capable moon lander by 2040, "with the goal of building a lunar economic base by 2045," The Korea Times wrote.

South Korea isn't the only nation with moon-base ambitions. The United States also plans to build one or more lunar outposts in the next decade or so, via NASA's Artemis program. China is working toward the goal as well, in partnership with Russia and other nations. And India has said it wants to build a moon base by 2047.

The moon isn't KASA's only distant destination, by the way; the agency also wants to pull off South Korea's first-ever Mars landing by 2045.

Armstrong's words, spoken less than seven hours before he and fellow NASA astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin took humanity's first steps on the surface of another world, marked a watershed moment in human history. However, the now famous phrase could easily have been uttered from the opposite side of the lunar disk from Tranquility Base.

In February 1968, NASA's Apollo Site Selection Board revealed five potential landing sites for Apollo 11 — whittled down from a list of 30 — including two that were on the opposite side of the lunar disk from Tranquility base, in Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms).

Each of the 3-by-5-mile (5-by-8-kilometer) landing zones were subject to intensive orbital imaging and were ultimately selected based on a number of diverse criteria. For example, each site had to be located within 5 degrees of the lunar equator in order to expend the least amount of fuel and have no large hills or deep craters along the lander's approach, which could have confused its landing radar. Each site also had to have a slope of less than 2 degrees, with relatively few craters and excellent lighting during the selected landing windows.

Site 2 in the Sea of Tranquility was eventually selected as the prime landing site, while two of the remaining shortlisted zones were designated as contingency landing zones to be targeted should the launch of Apollo 11's gigantic Saturn V rocket be delayed.

Read on to discover the locations of the five landing zones considered as the setting for humanity's first steps on another world. The general lunar region containing each site can be found easily with the naked eye during the correct moon phases, but we've also included a more precise map for those observing the moon through a telescope. A 6-inch scope will allow you to spot the larger craters needed to hone in on the locations of the candidate sites. Happy hunting!

Candidate Site 1 —Mare Tranquillitatis (34° East, 2°40" North)

The first shortlisted site for the Apollo 11 landing can be found on the southern shore of the Sea of Tranquility and is best viewed as the moon approaches its first quarter moon phase, or during the full moon, when the entirety of the lunar surface is lit from the perspective of Earth.

First, locate the dark expanse of the Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis) located slightly above the lunar equator in the eastern region of the lunar surface. If you struggle, simply take a look at the graphic below! This lunar feature is an enormous basaltic plain, which formed billions of years ago when lava flows flooded gigantic impact basins, before hardening in the frigid space environment.

The Sea of Tranquility is large enough to be seen easily with the unaided eye. Using a telescope, you can also locate the prominent Maskelyne Crater (shown below) and draw an imaginary line east until you hit a brighter patch of terrain jutting up from the south. Apollo 11's first candidate landing zone can be found in the patch of lunar mare bordering this outcrop to the east.

Candidate Site 2 —Tranquility Base (23°37" East, 0°45" North)

Tranquility Base, the site of Apollo 11's historic 1969 landing — can be found to the southwest of the Sea of Tranquility and, like its predecessor, is best viewed in the buildup to the first quarter and full moon phases.

For a closer look, first find the tightly clustered Ritter and Sabine craters on the western edge of the lunar sea. Next, draw an imaginary line three times the width of the Sabine Crater from the lower edge of the impact site leading to the right. This will give you the approximate location of humanity's first footprints on another world.

Candidate Site 3 —Sinus Medii (1°20" West, 0°25" North)

Our third Apollo 11's landing site candidate is situated in the Sinus Medii region smack in the center of the Earth-facing lunar surface. The region containing the landing zone is almost equidistant between the northern edge of Ptolemaeus, and the smaller Ukert crater to the north is best viewed during the weeks straddling a full moon.

Sinus Medii would have been the site of the Apollo 11 landing had the mission's Saturn V launch been delayed by just two days from its historic date of July 16, 1969 to July 18.

Candidate Sites 4 & 5 —Oceanus Procellarum (36°25" West, 3°30" South, 41°40" West, 1°40" North)

Oceanus Procellarum plays host to the final two Apollo 11 landing zones considered in the runup to the historic mission, which are best viewed during the moon's third quarter, or full moon phases. Both can be found below the bright impact ejecta thrown out in the creation of the Kepler Crater to the north and to the right of the Flamsteep P formation.

Had the Apollo 11 Saturn V launch slipped to July 21 1969, then humanity's first steps on the moon would have been left in the regolith coating Oceanus Procellarum instead. 'Procellarum Base' just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it.

Editor's Note: If you capture the site of Apollo 11's shortlisted landing sites and want to share them with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Earlier this year, there were two other moon-Pleiades encounters. On the evening of January 9th, an 82%waxing gibbous moon temporarily hid the Pleiades for parts of the U.S., Canada and Central America and then during the overnight hours of February 5-6, a 61% waxing gibbous moon passed in front of the cluster. If you caught one, or both of the first two events (or if you didn't), make a note on your calendar to watch this final moon-Pleiades rendezvous of the year.

In this upcoming case, you will either have to stay up through the night (to await moonrise, which will occur around 1:00 a.m. local daylight time) or set your alarm for the predawn morning hours.

In addition, since the moon will be a lovely waning crescent, as opposed to a waxing gibbous in January and February, stars will disappear first along the bright lunar crescent.
You'll need at least a small telescope, for binoculars probably won't be enough for following stars in the final minutes or seconds as the moon's glare, sunlit edge creeps up to them. But practically any telescope will magnify enough to do the trick. Use 50x magnification, perhaps more if your scope has a solid mount that allows easy tracking.

Stars will reappear about an hour later from behind the moon's dark limb in dramatic fashion: appearing to suddenly "pop-on" as if someone threw a switch. Here, binoculars should do fine, especially if you mount them on a tripod, provided you're watching at exactly the right moment.

In Canada's Maritime Provinces and the northeastern U.S., advancing morning twilight will be an issue, since the eastern sky will be brightening as the moon approaches the Pleiades. As a result, the disappearance of some stars will not be visible because the sky will be too bright. Nonetheless, the view in binoculars of the crescent moon sitting to the upper right of the star cluster will still make for a very pretty sight.

Farther west, the sky will be darker, but the moon and the Pleiades will be lower. This will be especially true for the far-western states and the Canadian province of British Columbia; therefore, a clear and unobstructed view toward the east-northeast is recommended.

Below are two timetables giving local circumstances for the disappearance and reappearance of the four brightest members of the Pleiades that will be occulted. The information is based in part on data generated by the International Occultation Timers Association (IOTA) and is valid for fourteen U.S., two Canadian and one Mexican city. Keep in mind, however, that many other stars not listed here will also be occulted.

If the disappearance or reappearance of a star takes place during dawn twilight, the time is provided in italic font. Also, take note that if the disappearance or reappearance of a star occurs near or soon after the start of civil twilight (roughly 40 minutes before sunrise), it is assumed that the sky would probably be too bright to easily see it. In addition, the moon might miss the star entirely. In both such cases, the time is omitted. All times are in local civil time.

Specific times and zones of visibility

Courtesy of IOTA, detailed prediction pages are available for each of the four brightest stars — Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, and Maia. These include Universal Time (UT) disappearance and reappearance data, as well as Mercator maps showing where each occultation will be visible.

For example, from St. Louis, Missouri (in Central Daylight Time, UTC–5), Maia will disappear at 4:06 a.m. CDT and reappear at 4:51 a.m. CDT. At the moment of reappearance, the sun will be about 11 degrees below the horizon, meaning Maia should reappear in a twilight sky.

In addition to the timetable, a world map (Mercator projection) is provided, showing the region where the occultation will be visible. The boundaries are in different colors. The Cyan boundaries show the curves of the occultation disappearance or reappearance at moonrise or moonset. A continuous white line marks the nighttime northern and southern limits of the occultation. A continuous blue line denotes the occultation limits occurring during twilight, while a dotted red line depicts the occultation limits occurring in daylight.

For Alcyone, the occultation takes place over much of the western U.S. For Atlas, visibility occurs over the northwest U.S., western Canada and Alaska. For Electra, visibility will be over much of the U.S. and Canada, while the occultation of Maia will be visible primarily over the central and southern U.S. and Mexico.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope and other publications.

The brilliant planet is, of course, Venus, which outshines Aldebaran by almost five magnitudes or a light ratio difference of almost 100-fold. At this particular moment in time, both star and planet can be seen roughly one-quarter of the way up from the eastern horizon, roughly 45 minutes before sunrise.

Venus, a dazzling morning "star," rises about an hour prior to the first light of dawn and shines low in the east-northeast as dawn brightens. On Monday morning, you'll also see a delicately thin (14 percent illuminated) crescent moon hovering approximately 8 degrees above Venus. Your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees in width, so on Monday morning, the slender lunar sliver will appear almost "one fist" above Venus.

In a telescope, Venus is a disappointment: just a tiny, gibbous blob, 72 percent illuminated by the sun. It has shrunk and become more nearly round in recent months as it has swung far around to the back side of the sun as seen from Earth.

And situated well to the right of both Venus and the moon will be Aldebaran. The trio will appear to form a broad isosceles triangle with Venus marking the vertex angle, while Aldebaran and the moon form the base of the triangle. It will not be a particularly "tight" array, but still should be attractive enough to catch the attention of early risers.

With the reappearance of Aldebaran, it is also a gentle reminder that while we are not yet at the midpoint of summer, the colder nights of fall and winter will be looming in the months to come. Aldebaran is crossing the meridian at midnight around Thanksgiving ... and at around 9 p.m. in mid-January.

Who knows? By then, some of you might be shoveling snow.

So take advantage of this week's opportunity to see not only an out-of-season winter star, but Venus as well, while they both "flirt" with a waning crescent moon.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope and other publications.

What is it?

The two telescopes seen in this image are the U.S. Naval Observatory Deep South Telescope and the DIMM2 seeing monitor, both part of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a program of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) NOIRLab.. Both help survey the night skies and provide a place for astronomers in the southern hemisphere to study the stunning and surprising structures in space.

Where is it?

Both telescopes are located 310 miles (500 km) north of Santiago, Chile, at an altitude of 7,200 feet (2,200 meters).

Why is it amazing?

Lunar eclipses are captivating to watch, as Earth passes directly between the sun and the moon, casting its shadow onto the surface of the moon. This only happens when the Earth, sun and moon are all perfectly aligned. According to NOIRLab, this alignment period was used by ancient astronomers as early as 600 BCE and called a "saros." The time between saros periods is around 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours.

To get the full detail of a lunar eclipse, it helps to have binoculars or a telescope. Astrophotographers looking to upgrade their stargazing gear to capture lunar eclipses, should read our guide to the best cameras for capturing the night sky in 2025.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about lunar eclipses and the telescopes in Chile as researchers continue to study our night skies.

This is the conclusion of a team of scientists from China who have found a one-step method of doing all this. Whether it is economically viable, however, is up for debate.

But the Chinese team thinks that it is. "The biggest surprise for us was the tangible success of this integrated approach," said team-member Lu Wang, who is a chemist from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a statement. "The one-step integration of lunar water extraction and photothermal carbon dioxide catalysis could enhance energy utilization efficiency and decrease the cost and complexity of infrastructure development."

They point out that studies have shown that transporting supplies from Earth to any future moon base would be expensive because the greater the mass of cargo, the harder a rocket has to work to launch into space. Studies have indicated that it would cost $83,000 to transport just one gallon of water from Earth to the moon, and yet each astronaut would be expected to drink 4 gallons of water per day.

Fortunately, the moon has plentiful water, although it is not automatically apparent. Brought to the moon by impacts of comets, asteroids and micrometeoroids, and even by the solar wind, water lurks in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles, trapped within minerals such as ilmenite.

Extracting the water for drinking is relatively easy and there are numerous technologies that describe how this can be done, including heating the regolith by focusing sunlight onto it. However, the Chinese team has been able to take this one step further.

"What's novel here is the use of lunar soil as a catalyst to crack carbon dioxide molecules and combine them with extracted water to produce methane," Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist from the University of Central Florida, told Space.com. Metzger was not involved in the new research, but he is the co-founder of the NASA Kennedy Space Center's 'Swamp Works', a research lab for designing technologies for construction, manufacturing and mining on planetary (and lunar) surfaces.

Methane would be more desirable than liquid hydrogen as a potential rocket fuel because it is easier to keep stable, thereby requiring less machinery and less cost to keep on the moon. Liquid methane, when mixed with oxygen as an oxidizer, is a potent rocket fuel. Many commercial companies such as China's Landspace are already launching methane-powered rockets.

The water-bearing ilmenite is also a useful catalyst for reacting the water with carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and methane, and the Chinese team have developed a one-step process for doing so. First, they heat the regolith to 392 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) by focusing sunlight to release the water inside. Then, carbon dioxide such as that which could be breathed out by astronauts is added to the mix, causing the ilmenite to catalyze the reaction between the extracted water and the carbon dioxide. Researchers tested this process, known as photothermal catalysis, in the laboratory using a simulant based on samples of lunar regolith returned to Earth by China's Chang'e 5 mission (the lunar samples are far too previous to destroy in such experiments, which is why a simulant is used instead).

While previous technologies have also been able to accomplish this, they required more steps and more machinery, and used a catalyst that would have to be transported up from Earth. This, the research team believe, makes their process more efficient and less expensive than the alternatives.

However, Metzger is not wholly confident that it will work. For one thing, lunar regolith is a proficient thermal insulator, so heating a sample all the way through would not be easy.

"The heat does not spread effectively deeper into the soil, and this greatly reduces the amount of water that can be produced in a given time," Metzger said. One option could be to 'tumble' the regolith, turning it over repeatedly so that the heat is more evenly applied, but this slows the extraction of water and increases the mechanical complexity of the process. In an environment where lunar dust gets into every nook and cranny, and where temperature fluctuations between night and day can be as great as 482 degrees Fahrenheit (250 Celsius), the risk of breakdown only increases as more moving parts enter the equation.

"It may be doable, but more maturation of the technology is needed to show that it is actually competitive," said Metzger.

There's also a problem with the application of carbon dioxide, something recognized by both the Chinese team and Metzger. Specifically, there's a question mark over whether astronauts could produce enough carbon dioxide through their normal exhalation. Metzger calculates that astronauts could only provide a tenth of the carbon dioxide required. Alternatively, carbon dioxide could be shuttled up from Earth, but this would rather defeat the purpose of the proposed technique, which was to develop a lot-cost means of obtaining water, oxygen and methane with resources largely already available on the moon.

However, in the long-run, perhaps shipping some materials up from Earth will be beneficial. Metzger points out a similar experiment that used an exotic granular catalyst – nickel-on-kieselguhr (kieselguhr is a kind of sedimentary rock) – rather than lunar regolith. Metzger suspects that a material specifically designed to be a catalyst, such as nickel-on-kieselguhr, would be more efficient than lunar regolith. Plus, although it would be expensive to transport from Earth, the nickel-on-kieselguhr can be re-used so you would only need to transport it to the moon once. In a cost-benefit analysis, in the long term it might be more efficient to do this instead.

Regardless, the research team has convincingly shown that using lunar regolith as a catalyst to produce fuel and water works. The next step is to show that the technology can be scaled up to sustain a base on the moon more efficiently than other techniques, and that it can operate in lunar conditions where the gravity is weaker, the temperature swings to large extremes, and there is intense radiation from space.

"I think these are highly interesting results and there may be additional applications to use lunar soil as a photocatalyst," said Metzger. "More work will be needed to show whether this concept can be economically competitive. I am skeptical, but all good ideas have their detractors and you can never really know until somebody does the work to prove it."

There is certainly no immediate rush for the technology. With NASA's Artemis III mission, which aims to finally return astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2027 at the earliest, and funding made available for Artemis IV and V at some indeterminate time in the future, we're not yet in a position to build a permanent lunar base.

However, the Artemis missions are the perfect opportunity to trial some of these technologies and will be greatly important for showing whether we really can live on the moon or not.

The research was published on July 16 in the journal Joule.

China has taken a new step in its long-term planning for lunar exploration with the completion of a "simulated moon underground space."

Researchers have established a practice area in a volcanic lava cave in a forest region near Jingbo Lake in Mudanjiang City, located in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. The move is in response to research suggesting that lava tube systems are present on the moon and Mars and could provide shielding from those worlds' harsh radiation environments.

"The underground volcanic lava pipes by the Jingbo Lake are the most similar environment on Earth to the underground space of the moon. I hope our forward-looking research can serve China's lunar exploration program," Li Jiaqi, a researcher at Peking University, told China Central Television (CCTV).

Experimental robots are already being used to test conducting autonomous exploration and multi-functional operations in the simulated lunar environment.

"Compared with traditional lunar roving vehicles and exploration robots, it has stronger environmental adaptability and flexibility," said Li Xianglong, a doctoral student from the Harbin Institute of Technology. "When exploring the underground space of the moon for the future, it can possess more precise perception, decision-making and operation capabilities."

Students also set up seismometers in the area to serve as a reference for future lunar experiments. China's Chang'e 7 mission to the lunar south pole, set to launch sometime in 2026, will carry a seismograph to study the moon's interior and detect moonquakes, caused by tidal forces from Earth, and temperature changes affecting the lunar surface. China plans to establish an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s.

The 311-gram space rock was discovered in 2023 and is known as the Northwest Africa 16286 meteorite — and based on the decay of the lead isotopes that it contains, its formation has been dated to about 2.35 billion years ago.

"Its age and composition show that volcanic activity continued on the moon throughout this timespan, and our analysis suggests an ongoing heat-generation process within the moon, potentially from radiogenic elements decaying and producing heat over a long period," said lead researcher Joshua Snape of the University of Manchester in a statement.

The meteorite is an important piece in the jigsaw that is the moon's history, filling-in an almost billion-year-long gap in our knowledge. The meteorite is much younger than samples brought back to Earth by NASA's Apollo missions, the Soviet Union's Luna missions and China's Chang'e 6 mission, all of which range between 3.1 billion and 4.3 billion years old, but older than the 1.9-billion-year-old rocks returned by Chang'e 5.

Crucially, meteorite 16286 has a volcanic origin, with geochemical analysis showing that it formed when a lava flow from deep within the moon vented onto the surface and solidified. It contains relatively large crystals of a mineral called olivine, moderate levels of titanium and high levels of potassium. Its lead isotopes also point to a volcanic source deep underground that has an unusually high uranium-to-lead ratio (the lead being a decay product of uranium). This abundance of uranium, and the heat it produced as it underwent radioactive decay, is a potential clue as to what was keeping volcanism going a billion years after the moon's main bouts of volcanism had ceased.

There are only 31 volcanic lunar rocks that have been found on Earth in the form of meteorites, and meteorite 16286 is by far the youngest.

"Moon rocks are rare, so it's interesting when we get something that stands out and looks different to everything else," said Snape.

The meteorite is more evidence that volcanism continued throughout this period on the moon; Chang'e 5 has found such evidence in its samples from the moon's farside of volcanism in the past 123 million years. Together, these discoveries are transforming what we thought we thought we knew about the moon's volcanism and how the moon has remained geologically active, at least in bursts, almost to the present day.

The next step is to pinpoint the meteorite's origin on the moon: likely a crater blasted into the surface by an impact that ejected the meteorite long ago. Once identified, it will be a prime location for a future sample-return mission to learn more about lunar volcanism during this little-known period, from which so few samples exist.

Snape presented the findings at the world's premier geochemistry meeting, the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague held between July 6 and July 11.

Once every 15 years, Saturn's tilted orbit brings its iconic rings — and Titan's orbital path — into an edge-on alignment with Earth. This event, known as a ring-plane crossing, heralds the onset of a season of dramatic 'shadow transits', as Titan's vast umbral silhouette periodically sweeps across the gas giant's surface.

"Sighting a shadow transit of Titan for an amateur astronomer is somewhat the equivalent of a fisherman hooking and reeling in a particularly large or elusive fish," Hayden Planetarium instructor and lecturer Joe Rao told Space.com in an email. "It is so unusual a sight that doesn't happen very often, which is why even veteran skywatchers are excited at the possibility of making such a sighting."

When is Titan's shadow transit?

Titan's next shadow transit will get underway at 3 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT) on July 18, at which time the moon's dark outline will be visible slowly progressing across Saturn's cloudy disk, according to Sky and Telescope.

Look for Saturn in the southeastern sky, just below the stars of the constellation Pisces shining like a bright star to the naked eye, with the moon in the east.

Observers in the U.S. will have a good view of the first two hours of the shadow transit, but by the time Titan's shadow leaves Saturn's disk at 8:05 a.m. EDT (12:05 GMT), the brightening dawn will overpower the view.

How powerful does a telescope need to be to spot Titan's shadow?

At the time of the shadow transit, Titan and Saturn will be separated by approximately 846 million miles (1.36 billion kilometers) from Earth — far beyond the capabilities of the naked eye or binoculars, but well within reach of many amateur telescopes.

We asked Rao for guidance on the kind of scope needed to view Titan's shadow transit. "An 8-inch telescope at 200-power or a 10-inch telescope at 250-power should provide a good view of Titan's shadow, especially on a night of good seeing," Rao explained.

To calculate the magnifcation of your telescope, you need only divide its focal length by the focal length of your chosen eyepiece. For example, a 1000 mm telescope with a 10 mm eyepiece yields 100-power magnification.

Rao also emphasised that stable atmospheric conditions are crucial to obtaining a clear view. This becomes more important when using higher power with a smaller aperture scope. It's best to use one-half magnification/power when viewing distant objects to avoid them appearing to "boil", or "scintilate" when viewed through the eyepiece.

"At least 200-power is necessary for getting a reasonably good view of the dark 'shadow dot' projected on Saturn's disk," continued Rao. "The general rule of thumb is to utilize 50-power for every inch of aperture of the telescope objective, or mirror. So, for a 4-inch telescope, the maximum magnification to be used is 200-power, which is considered the limit for a telescope of that size."

When are the next Titan shadow transits?

After the July 18 event, five more Titan shadow transits will be visible from Earth. Each occurs roughly16 days after the last — a result of Titan's 16-day orbital period — and starting progressively earlier in the night for viewers in the U.S.

The next transit after this week will begin at 2:25 a.m. (0625 GMT) on August 3, while the last chance to catch the moon's shadow fall on Saturn will take place on October 6.

After the October event, stargazers will have to wait another 15 years before the next ring crossing brings Titan — and its shadow — into alignment once more!

Titan's shadow through the eyes of the Cassini spacecraft

Without question, the most spectacular views of a Titan shadow transit came courtesy of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which witnessed the moon's dark outline fall over Saturn's cloud surface in November 2009, while it travelled a mere 1.3 million miles (2.1 million km) from the colossal gas giant. Cassini has long since found its resting place beneath the cloud surface of Saturn, but amateur astronomers will have an opportunity to follow in Cassini's steps later this week and witness the next Titan shadow transit for themselves when it takes place on July 18.

"Though we, living in the 21st century, have grown accustomed to seeing the Saturnian system through the eyes of Cassini, there still remains the thrill of witnessing, with one's own eyes, a major celestial event in the life of another planet a billion miles away," Carolyn Porco, planetary scientists and imaging team leader for NASA's Cassini mission told Space.com in an email.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your images of the Titan shadow transit with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

China's Tianwen 2 probe has captured striking pictures of home as it heads out to a near-Earth asteroid to collect samples.

Tianwen 2 launched from Xichang on a Long March 3B rocket on May 28 and is en route to the enigmatic asteroid Kamo'oalewa. But shortly after departure, the spacecraft took the opportunity to test out its cameras.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) released a statement on July 1 including images of Earth and the moon. The image of Earth was captured by Tianwen 2's narrow field of view navigation sensor while 590,000 kilometers (367,000 miles) away from the planet on May 30. A couple of hours later, the same instrument took a shot of the moon from a similar distance.

At the time of that update, Tianwen 2 had been in Earth orbit for 33 days, CNSA officials said. The probe was more than 12 million km (7.46 million miles) away from Earth and was in good working condition. Previously, Tianwen 2 returned an image of one of its two circular solar arrays using an engineering camera, providing our first glimpse of the actual spacecraft.

Tianwen 2 is China's first asteroid mission. It aims to collect samples from Kamo'oalewa, one Earth's seven known "quasi moons," and is expected to arrive at the rocky body around July 2026. It will then study the small asteroid to determine possible landing sites before collecting samples and heading for home, delivering its precious payload in a reentry capsule in late 2027. Analysis of the samples could shed light on the early days of our solar system.

"[This asteroid] is very likely to hold the original information of the solar system at its birth, which is of great scientific research value for our understanding of the material composition of the early solar system, including its formation process and evolutionary history," Han Siyuan, deputy director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center (LESEC) under CNSA, told Chinese state-run broadcaster CCTV.

Tianwen 2's mission won't end there. The spacecraft will use its return to Earth to make a gravity slingshot maneuver to send it onto the next step of its journey: a rendezvous with the main belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS, which will occur around 2035.

The mission is the second in China's "Tianwen" planetary exploration series. Tianwen 1, launched in 2020, sent an orbiter and a rover to Mars. That spacecraft jettisoned a small camera on its way to the Red Planet to deliver an epic deep-space selfie, raising the notion that Tianwen 2 could perform a similar act at some point during its own voyage.

July's third quarter moon phase occurs at 8:38 EDT (0038 GMT) on July 17, according in-the-sky.org. At this moment, skywatchers in the northern hemisphere will see the left side of the lunar disk illuminated by sunlight, while the right side remains cloaked in shadow.

Stargazers across the U.S. will get their first glimpse at the third quarter moon as it rises above the eastern horizon shortly before midnight local time on July 17, with the bright planet Saturn shining off to the east. The exact time for moonrise will vary based on your location, so be sure to check a website like TimeandDate.com to find specifics for your locale.

Once risen, the third quarter moon will remain visible throughout the night, allowing plenty of time to explore the illuminated regions of the lunar disk.

The best place to look? Along the terminator — the line separating night from day on the moon's surface. Here, sunlight emphasises the rims of craters formed in violent asteroid impacts, while leaving swathes of their interiors bathed in shadow.

Look slightly to the left of the terminator near the equator to spot the 57-mile-wide (93-kilometers) Copernicus Crater on the southern rim of Mare Imbrium (Latin for the "Sea of Showers"). This ancient basaltic plain formed billions of years ago when lava flooded impact basins, before solidifying to re-pave the lunar surface.

The smaller Kepler Crater will also be visible Both Copernicus and the smaller Kepler Crater to its left are surrounded by bright streaks of reflective material that were thrown out in the violent aftermath of their creation.

While the third quarter moon will present a mesmerizing sight to the naked eye, a telescope with an aperture of 6 inches will help resolve a wealth of craters and finer details marking its ancient surface. If you're new to lunar observing, be sure to read our guide to exploring the moon with a telescope.

Stargazers interested in getting a closer view of Earth's natural satellite should check out our roundup of the best telescopes and binoculars for moongazing available in 2025.

Editor's Note: If you capture an image of the third quarter moon and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s) and comments, along with your name and the location of your shoot to spacephotos@space.com.

The near side of the moon is familiar to us as the only side that we can see from Earth. Dark regions called maria are vast lava plains filling lowland impact basins, and give us the pattern of the "man in the moon." Yet the far side of the moon, which can only be seen by orbiting spacecraft, has barely any maria and is covered by craggy, cratered and ancient highlands. That's not the only difference between the two hemispheres; the thickness of the moon's crust is thinner on the near side, volcanic activity appears to have occurred at different points in time, and the mantle beneath the far side seems heavily depleted in certain elements compared to the near side.

However, while we have many samples from the lunar near side, particularly those brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions, the Soviet Luna missions and China's own Chang'e 5, we had nothing from the far side with which to test theories.

Then, in June 2024, China's Chang'e 6 mission landed in the SPA basin and brought back samples totaling 1,935.3 grams (68.27 ounces).

The SPA basin is the largest impact site on the moon, spanning 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles) and extends from the lunar south pole and onto the far side of the moon. It's also the oldest known impact feature on the moon, with an age of 4.25 billion years. What impact — pardon the pun — could the sheer violence of the SPA basin's formation have had on lunar geology and the thermal evolution of the moon's interior? Could it have caused the dichotomy between the moon's two hemispheres?

Chang'e 6's samples are the first from the lunar far side, and have offered a unique opportunity to test models that could potentially explain the difference between the moon's two hemispheres.

Consequently, following analysis of the samples, researchers led by a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have announced four major discoveries.

The first is that the samples contain volcanic rocks called basalts that date to prolonged volcanic outbursts on the lunar far side in two distinct phases, one around 4.2 billion years ago and another 2.8 billion years ago.

"We propose that the 4.2-billion-year-old basalt was associated with the formation of the SPA basin because it is a high-aluminum basalt, requiring the incorporation of crustal plagioclase into its source," Wei Yang, a professor at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Space.com in an email interview. Meanwhile, "the 2.8-billion-year-old basalts originated from the deep mantle, the product of the early stage crystallization of the lunar magma ocean."

The evolution of this lunar magma ocean that formed the moon's mantle is central to the next discovery, which is that geochemical analysis of the basalt samples points to a source in the lunar mantle deep below ground that is heavily depleted in particular elements such as thorium. It is unknown whether this depleted mantle is found only beneath the SPA basin, or whether it is more extensive across the moon.

"To be honest, we don't know," said Yang.

One possibility is that the moon has had this depleted mantle since birth, in which case both the near and far sides should share this composition. The other possibility is that it was produced after the lunar magma ocean formed and began to crystallize.

"Personally, I am more inclined to believe the latter, given that such a massive impact has the potential to affect the mantle down to a depth of 250 kilometers [155 miles]," said Yang. "If it is only present in the SPA basin, then it must have formed as a result of the SPA impact. To figure this out, we need to collect more samples from the moon's far side, particularly from areas outside the SPA."

The third discovery is of something we wouldn't expect to find on the moon: water. However, we are talking parts-per-million here — the Apollo samples were considered "bone dry," and the far side mantle seems to be even drier than that.

"The water content of this mantle is lower than those of the mantle sources of all the basalts from the near side," said Yang.

The final discovery relates to the moon's magnetic field. Earth's natural satellite currently doesn't have a global magnetic field, and traces of magnetism remain only in a handful of anomalous patches called lunar swirls. However, in the distant past it did have a global magnetic field. The Chang'e 6 samples retain a record of it, and show that the magnetic field, after decaying for a time, rebounded in strength about 2.8 billion years ago. This indicates that the moon's internal dynamo fluctuated, possibly episodically, rather than just experiencing a slow but gradual decline.

The timing coincides with the second phase of volcanism on the far-side.

"The magnetic field rebounded 2.8 billion years ago, which suggests that the interior of the moon still contained a lot of energy," said Yang. "Perhaps convection and the upward flow of hot material existed in the lunar mantle at that time."

Not only could this upward flow have triggered volcanic eruptions, it could have been enough to vaporize much of the water in the mantle, drying it out.

If the creation of the SPA basin is the cause of much of this, then it has repercussions that go far beyond the moon. Other giant impact features are seen on other bodies, particularly on Mercury and Mars. We may have underestimated the role that these giant impacts played on the evolution of the planets' interiors.

The Chang'e 6 results were presented in four papers (1, 2, 3, 4) that were published recently in the journal Nature.

For the past 17 years, the Royal Observatory Greenwich — supported by astronomy camera maker ZWO — has called on the global photography community to compete in an open competition celebrating the majesty and variety of our night sky.

The 2025 competition saw photographers from 69 countries submit over 5,500 entries to compete in a plethora of diverse categories to gain recognition and, naturally, prize money. The overall winner of the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the year will bag a £10,000 (about $13,560 U.S.) grand prize, while the photographers who come out on top in each individual category receive £1,500 (about $2,030 U.S.) for their valiant efforts.

"At ZWO, we believe that astrophotography is not only a way to record the cosmos, but also a way to inspire curiosity, foster education and build communities that transcend borders," said ZWO founder Sam Wen in a press release revealing the shortlisted images. "Everyone deserves a chance to connect with the universe — and through our support, we hope to bring that experience to more people."

The winners of each category will be announced in an awards ceremony in September later this year, with the victorious entries — and select runners-up — later being exhibited at the National Maritime Museum in London.

Read on to see the spectacular images shortlisted for the 2025 ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the year awards!

Auroras

This image of a swirling green aurora was captured from a remote location on the Senja Peninsula in northern Norway by Filip Brebenda on Sept 12, 2024. Silvery birch trees dominate the foreground, while a rocky outcrop frames the aurora dancing through the sky above, which is reflected in a placid pool of water between the trunks.

Photographer Daniel Zafra was able to capture a rare occurrence of a magenta and green aurora reflecting off the waters of California's Mono Lake in October 2024, alongside protruding rocky formations.

Vincent Beudez imaged a breathtaking auroral display reminiscent of an arctic flower unfolding in the skies over Tromsø in northern Norway on April 4, 2024, framed by the snowy peaks of nearby mountains. He used a Sony Alpha 7S III camera to get the shot.

Galaxies

An image of the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), as captured by astrophotographers Bence Tóth, Péter Feltóti, Bertalan Kecskés from Hungary over the course of several sessions over November-December 2024. The galaxy can be seen undergoing a burst of star formation thanks to the tidal influence of a galactic neighbor, with the glowing red form of an emission nebula visible throughout, giving the impression of a cosmic firework display.

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) can be seen shining with the light of countless stars and nebulas in this image taken from the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan, China in late 2024. It took around 216 hours to capture the ancient light used in the creation of the image, which shows the bright central bulge and spiral arms of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbor in phenomenal detail.

The barred spiral galaxy NGC 2997 — also known as the Antlia Cabbage Galaxy — is pictured surrounded by glowing red cosmic clouds in this shot by Xinran Li taken from Río Hurtado, Chile in January and February earlier this year. The galaxy exists at a distance of 35 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia and took around 10 hours of observing time to capture using a range of filters.

Our Moon

A distorted moon can be seen rising over the French château of Villebois-Lavalette in this shot by Flavien Beauvais. The shot was taken during the full moon phase in November 2024 using a Canon EOD R7 camera in conjunction with a Sigma 150-600 mm lens.

This composite image captured by Chayaphon Phanitloet from the Nakhon Ratchasima region of Thailand depicts a period in October 2024 when the moon slid in front of Saturn — visible to the left of the image — blocking its light.

Photographer Karthik Easvur created this portrait of a supermoon looming large in the sky over Delhi, India, in November 2024, by stitching together 24 separate images into a seamless mosaic. The so-called "Beaver Moon" was captured using a 6-inch aperture telescope in conjunction with a ZWO camera along with several more helpful peripherals and filters.

Our Sun

Zhang Yanguang was able to capture this perfectly timed composite shot of the International Space Station (ISS) sweeping across the face of the sun from the Fujian region of China on Jan. 24 ofthis year. The photographer deftly maintained the crisp profile of the space station when combining the images during post-processing, while revealing phenomenal detail on the surface of our parent star.

This image of a 311,000-mile-long (500,000 kilometers) solar prominence erupting from the sun was captured on Nov. 7, 2024 from Guangdong province in China by astrophotographer PengFei Chou. The image is constructed from 20 stacked data sets captured over the course of the hour-long eruption.

An artistic view of the sun captured by photographer Damien Cannane, depicting the different phases of a solar eclipse. The arcs in between the eclipsed suns represent a phenomenon known as "Baily's Beads," which arise as sunlight shines through valleys on the lunar surface in the moments before and after totality.

People & Space

Tianyao Yang took this picture of the July 2024 full moon behind skyscrapers in the Lujiazui district of Shanghai. The shot was the culmination of five years of planning and was taken from a distance of 16.5 miles (26.5 km) using a long lens, allowing the photographer to give the moon an outsized appearance compared to the foreground buildings.

This picture, taken from Songyang County, China by photographer Yujie Zhang in August 2024, shows the bright ribbon of the Milky Way tumbling toward a collection of geometric buildings reflected in a foreground body of water.

This placid scene taken with a Canon R6 Mark II camera by photographer Paul Joels captures the Milky Way in the sky over a boathouse in Lulworth Cove in the U.K. A multitude of stars can be seen shining down on the seaside vista, twinkling above a lone boat resting on the roadside.

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) is seen streaking through the sky above Honolulu, Hawaii, as captured from the Pu'u O Kaimukī Park by photographer Ran Shen on Oct. 12, 2024.

Chester Hall-Fernandez captured this view of the Milky Way setting parallel to the horizon over the Mount John Observatory in New Zealand on July 21, 2024. The MOA-II telescope — the largest telescope on New Zealand's South Island — can be seen to the right of the image, observing the countless stars populating the southern hemisphere night sky.

Planets, Comets & Asteroids

An image of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS captured from Namibia in southern Africa by photographers Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger in September last year, featuring dust (grey) and ion (blue) tails. The "kinks" in the more tenuous ion trail are created as the solar wind pouring from our parent star impacts the particle trail shed by the wandering comet.

This family portrait of solar system planets — excluding Earth for obvious reasons — was captured with the aid of a 20-inch Dobsonian telescope in Bavaria, Germany, between September 2023 and December 2024 by astrophotographer Sophie Paulin. The planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — can be seen parading in a line from left to right in the composite piece.

Skyscapes

Benjamin Barakat captured this image of a lone tree standing in front of star trails from the Hidaybu district of Yemen on March 13, 2024 using a Sony Alpha 7 IV camera.

A full moon is pictured rising over the Dolomite mountains in Italy by photographer Fabian Dalpiaz in November 2024, as the last of the sunlight catches the upper slopes on a cloudless evening.

This composite shot of the Milky Way was captured by Yoshiki Abe from the mouth of a remote cave in the coastal region of Yamaguchi, Japan on Oct. 12, 2024. The foreground image was snapped during a brief window known to photographers as the "blue hour," which occurs around the time that the sun sets, infusing the environment with a blueish hue. Abe captured his image of the Milky Way later that same night.

A 23,000 pixel-wide panorama of the Utah Desert, imaged at night by astrophotographer Jim Hildreth with the Milky Way arcing high overhead amongst a sea of stars.

Photographer Andreas Karaolis captured this panorama of the Milky Way's Cygnus region streaking over a verdant hillside in Cyprus in October 2024. Karaolis also made use of the blue hour to capture the foreground image, snapping a series of 30- and 120-second exposures to capture it and the cosmic scene above, before combining them in the post-processing step.

Stars & Nebulas

This composite view of the Christmas Tree Nebula and Rosetta Nebula was captured from the Deep Sky Chile Observatory in November and December last year. The colorful view is the result of 150 hours of observation, during which the ancient light of the nebulas was collected using a wide range of filters.

A portrait of the "Running Chicken Nebula" (IC 2944) — an enormous stellar nursery located in the constellation Centaurus — captured by astrophotographer Rod Prazeres from Queensland, Australia over the course of several nights in March and April 2024.

Shaoyu Zhang took this electric view of the "Spaghetti Nebula" (Simeis 147) from Chile and Sichuan, China between December 2024 and February 2025. Over 148 hours of exposure time were used to obtain a "full-spectrum" image of the vast supernova remnant to reveal structures ordinarily hidden behind a veil of cosmic dust.

The Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer

An image of the Abel 85 supernova remnant captured in the skies above China by Deqian Li. Li used 23.4 hours of light data to create the image, which was captured over the course of a six-day camping trip in Hongyuan county, China with a Takahashi Epsilon-160ED telescope paired with a ZWO astronomy camera.

ZWO Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year

A 22-megapixel panorama showing the different stages of a total solar eclipse captured during the April 8, 2024 event by photographer Louis Egan from Quebec, Canada. The final piece was created using around 200 individual images.

Annie Maunder Open Category

Peter Ward's "neon sun" effect was created using ultraviolet data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which was remapped to colors visible to the naked eye, and turned "inside out" to surround the sun.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

In increasing number, probes are being dispatched by multiple countries that can plumb the depths of deliverables from space rocks.

Metallic asteroids are made up mostly of iron and nickel, and also contain platinum group metals, or PGMs for short. Similarly, carbonaceous asteroids are known to contain hydrated minerals.

Tantalizing tastes of asteroids have already been robotically sent back to Earth, by missions such as NASA's OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer), which delivered pieces of the space rock Bennu in September 2023.

Then there's NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which is scheduled to arrive in August 2029 at its target asteroid, Psyche — an object perhaps made of a mixture of rock and metal, with metal composing 30% to 60% of its volume.

Pick-action ready business?

Enter the entrepreneurial work of AstroForge, a company based in Huntington Beach, California. AstroForge sees mining asteroids as the next trillion-dollar industry and is fully engaged in trying to make space mining a real, "pick-action ready" business.

Last February, AstroForge successfully got its $3.5 million Odin spacecraft headed outward to reconnoiter 2022 OB5, a small near-Earth asteroid. But the following month, the firm declared Odin lost in space due to ground station and communication issues.

"Welcome to the school of Hard Rocks," said AstroForge CEO and co-founder Matt Gialich, as the company presses forward on a follow-on asteroid mission, Vestri, in 2026.

AstroForge is a deep-space mining company with the goal of extracting valuable metals from asteroids, starting with PGMs.

"By bringing space resources into Earth's supply chain," the company's website explains, "we're aiming to reduce the need for traditional terrestrial mining methods and explore a more sustainable future — one mission at a time."

Moon versus asteroids

Mining asteroids versus mining the moon was recently discussed by Alex Ellery, a research professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His research was detailed at the Space Resources Roundtable, held here last month at the Colorado School of Mines.

"Can humanity enjoy the benefits of both asteroid and lunar mining without compromise," Ellery asks, "or do we have to choose one at the expense of the other?"

Traditionally, asteroid mining has focused on precious materials like noble metals and PGMs, Ellery said, but only one in 2,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) is known to have PGMs in economically mineable concentrations. While water has been detected in asteroids, that water in hydrated minerals is also rare, roughly one in a 1,000 NEOs, he adds.

While asteroids have diverse resources, including some not found on the moon, they alone likely cannot support industrial self-sufficiency due to scarcity, dispersion, and technical complexity, Ellery thinks.

"If a lunar industry is able to collect deposits of asteroid-sourced materials, it would have both bulk and rare resources that would enable a closed industry in cislunar space," Ellery observes.

Lucrative lunar resources

According to a recent paper led by Jayanth Chennamangalam, an independent researcher in Vancouver, Canada, it may be more advantageous, and therefore more lucrative, to mine asteroids that have impacted the moon rather than the ones that are zipping through space.

We know that many asteroids have crashed into the moon over its lifetime, as evidenced by the craters left on its surface, Chennamangalam told Space.com.

"Most asteroids vaporize on impact, but some don't, and leave behind remnants, depending on the impact velocity," said Chennamangalam.

But how much of these asteroid-derived resources — PGMs and water/hydrated minerals — are still present on the moon?

"The key finding of our research is that there are potentially thousands of craters on the moon that contain PGM ore or hydrated minerals," said Chennamangalam.

"So what we have found," the researcher continued, "is that there are potentially a lot more craters on the moon with ore-bearing asteroidal remnants than there are accessible ore-bearing asteroids. Of course, there are several caveats that need to be kept in mind, and these are discussed in the paper."

That paper, by Chennamangalam and three colleagues, was published in May in the journal Planetary and Space Science.

International body proposed

Meanwhile, the prospect that asteroid orbits may be deliberately changed for research and mining, or in the future, by habitation, has gained the attention of a student team from Imperial College London, the University of Santiago de Compostela and Cairo University.

"Mining is especially likely, given sizable investments into long-term plans made by commercial actors," the student team reports in their proposal, which advocates for the creation of an international body, the Panel on Asteroid Orbit Alteration (PAOA).

That proposal was discussed at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, during a public ceremony on June 30 — Asteroid Day.

Emerging risks

The PAOA idea won the Schweickart Prize, a program of the B612 Foundation. The Schweickart Prize is an annual award designed to foster a new generation of leaders in planetary defense and to encourage ideas to help protect Earth from potential asteroid impacts.

The prize is named after Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, an Apollo 9 astronaut and the co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers and B612.

The PAOA would address emerging risks of unintended asteroid orbit changes from future human space activities.

The proposal "highlights the increasing likelihood of human space activities — including asteroid mining, scientific research missions, and even spacecraft malfunctions — inadvertently altering the orbits of near-Earth objects," notes the B612 Foundation.

"This international body would be tasked with establishing comprehensive scientific, technical and policy guidelines to manage such risks, ensuring a coordinated and effective planetary defense response as the space industry continues its rapid expansion," explains the B612 Foundation statement.

The asteroid, which at one point had a 1 in 43 chance of striking our planet, now has a 1 in 25 (4%) chance of hitting the moon in 2032.

New research suggests that if such an impact were to occur, ejecta blasted from the moon could damage satellites orbiting Earth. The resultant debris could also create a stunning meteor shower over Earth.

"A 2024 YR4 impact on the moon would pose no risk to anything on the surface of the Earth: our atmosphere will shield us," research author and University of Western Ontario astronomer Paul Wiegert told Space.com. "But the impact could pose some danger to equipment or astronauts (if any) on the moon, and certainly to satellites and other Earth-orbiting platforms, which are above our atmosphere."

What's the damage?

If 2024 YR4 were to strike the moon in 2032, it would be the largest lunar impact in approximately 5,000 years. Wiegert explained that the impact would release energy equivalent to the detonation of 6 million tons of TNT. That's comparable to the detonation of a large nuclear weapon.

For comparison, "Little Boy," the nuclear weapon that devastated Hiroshima, released an explosive yield equivalent to approximately 15,000 tons of TNT. Understandably, such a large blast on the lunar surface would create a lot of debris.

"The impact would excavate a crater about 0.62 miles (1 kilometer across)," Wiegert said. "Most of this material would fall back to the moon, but a small fraction, around 0.02% to 0.2%, could be ejected at high enough speeds to escape the moon."

Though that is just a small fraction of the total debris, it still equates to between 10 million and 100 million kilograms of lunar rock entering space.

"The YR4 impact, if it occurs and if it occurs in a favorable location, could produce a flux of meteoroids 10 to 1,000 times higher than the normal background for a few days," Wiegert said. "The debris would be travelling a bit slower than typical meteors, at around 22,400 miles per hour (10 km/s) rather than 44,700 to 67,100 mph (20 to 30 km/s), but this is still faster than most bullets."

In fact, that ejecta speed is about 11 times faster than a bullet fired by a rifle and 30 times as fast as a bullet from a handgun. That means these pieces of debris would have more than enough energy to damage satellites or other space-based technology.

To reach Earth-orbiting satellites, the debris would have to travel about 236,000 miles (380,000 km), meaning we would have hours to days of warning about the impending danger.

Fortunately, though this could disturb things here on the surface that rely on satellites, like communication, navigation, and weather monitoring, the direct risk is very low.

"The debris will burn up in Earth's atmosphere. We don't expect there to be many pieces large enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere," Wiegert said. "A rock would have to be 3.3 feet (1 meter) or more in diameter to survive entry, but we expect most of the debris to be inches or smaller."

Wiegert added that the impact of this debris to our immediete space enviroment could be long-lasting, lingering around Earth for years.

"We were surprised at how well material can be delivered to the Earth by this kind of impact, though it really depends on the asteroid impacting in a certain region of the moon, as impacts in other regions produce very little," he added.

So does the possible threat presented by 2024 YT4's potential impact on the moon warrant a new scale, similar to the Torino Scale (the method used to categorize the potential impact hazard of near-Earth objects like asteroids and comets)?

"No, the indirect consequences are too varied to compress into a single scale," Torino scale creator and planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Richard P. Binzel told Space.com. "The Torino Scale is all about whether a passing asteroid merits attention in the first place, and of course, most asteroids don't."

Binzel added that probability is always the key element with asteroids and any risk they pose.

"What one can control, by obtaining more telescopic measurements, is determining with certainty whether you have a hit or miss. After all, at the end of the day, an object either hits or misses. The answer is deterministic," he continued. "As much as I would love to be a spectator watching those lunar fireworks, that is not the way to bet or something to get too concerned about.

"The only imperative that makes sense right now is to get the data and bring certainty to the question of hit or miss."

Whether 2024 YR4 impacts the moon or not, where this impact would occur on the lunar surface, and the risk that it poses to space-tech could be determined when the asteroid returns to Earth and becomes visible again in 2028.

"Now we wait. There is, as of right now, about a 4% chance of asteroid YR4 hitting the moon, and we probably won't get this number updated until the asteroid returns to visibility in 2028," Wiegert said. "At that point, we should know pretty quickly whether or not it will in fact hit the moon.

"The whole event would be exciting to watch in binoculars or a small telescope."

The team's research has been submitted for publication in the American Astronomical Society journals, and a preprint version is available on the repository website arXiv.

July's full moon is known as the 'Buck Moon', in reference to the male deer — called bucks in the U.S. — that begin to grow out their antlers around this time of year. Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed this month’s full moon riding unusually low on the horizon. This is a result of the Buck Moon’s proximity to the summer solstice — a time when the sun is at its highest in the daytime sky and the moon travels a correspondingly low path through the night.

It also appeared near a phenomenon called a Major Lunar Standstill. Roughly every 18.6 years, the sun's gravity pulls the moon's tilted orbit into its most extreme inclination relative to Earth's celestial equator. As a result, the moon appears especially low in the sky during the summer months.

As always, the astrophotography community was ready to grab the lunar milestone by the horns, setting up imaginative compositions that captured the moon's fully-lit disk alongside world-famous landmarks and ancient ruins. If you missed the moon rise on July 10, don't worry, the moon will still appear full to the naked eye over the next couple of nights, so get out there and line up some shots.

Read on to see a roundup of the most spectacular images of July's full Buck Moon.

The July 2025 full Buck Moon in photos

Photographer Ismael Adnan Yaqoob captured this image of the full moon rising behind a Ferris wheel in the city of Mosul in Iraq on July 10, creating a spectacular blend of the old and new as the reflected light of the sun vied for attention with the glow of artificial light.

A ballerina strikes an elegant pose as the moon rises over the mountains near Ankara, Turkey. Photographer Evrim Aydin likely took the image using a long lens from far away, which allowed them to keep the subject in focus, while making the moon appear outsized in relation to the foreground object.

Photographer John Threlfall was able to capture a striking shot of the Buck Moon rising over St. Annes beach on the Fylde Coast in North West England on July 9 just ahead of the full moon phase.

"I had planned this shot for a while and last night I managed to capture it," Threlfall told Space.com in an email. "I was at a distance of about half a mile, using my telephoto lens at 600mm - the compression of the lens makes the Moon appear bigger. The people in the shot help give some scale."

Thin wisps of cloud can be seen lining the moon’s distorted disk, which takes on an orange hue while low on the horizon, as Earth’s atmosphere scatters the bluer wavelengths of reflected light, while allowing redder wavelengths to pass through relatively unhindered.

"What looks like internal lights on the pier building is actually the sunset colours reflecting off the glass, the sun was setting at the same time as the moon was rising," Threlfall continued. "The Moon is currently rising in its most southerly position compared to normal, rising in the South East, allowing for shots that are not normally possible. The Moon is also staying low in the sky currently due to the major lunar standstill."

Robertus Pudyanto captured this spectacularly detailed shot of July's full moon as it graced the skies over Surabaya, Indonesia, on July 10. Bright streaks of material can be seen marking the dark 'lunar seas', created when reflective material was cast far across the lunar surface by cataclysmic asteroid strikes in the distant past.

Photographer Lorenzo Di Cola lined up this shot of the orange-yellow full moon setting behind the ruins of the Rocca Calascio castle in Italy just before sunrise on July 11.

Julian Finney captured a tennis-themed full moon by imaging the moon’s disk behind the weathervane of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, where the 2025 Wimbledon competition is well underway.

The full Buck Moon can be seen rising over the Temple of Poseidon in southern Greece in this image captured by Costas Baltas as the lunar disk crept over the southeastern horizon on the night of July 10.

Firdous Nazir captured a striking image of the moon wreathed by clouds on July 10 from Kashmir, India. The coming days will see the moon’s shadowy terminator creep across its surface, heralding the onset of its waning gibbous phase.

Photographer Hakan Akgun managed to get into the perfect position to catch the full moon rise behind the iconic Galata Tower in Istanbul, Turkey on the night of July 10, capturing the warm lights of the city alongside the ruddy glow of Earth’s natural satellite, darkened by lunar maria.

X user Sigma Sreedhan also posted a stunning image of the 97 percent lit moon rising over Tahoma mountain — also known as Mount Rainier — in Washington State on July 9.

Veteran photographer Jeff Overs also shared a beautiful view of the full Buck Moon rising behind the Shard skyscraper and the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London to the social media platform.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Heads up skywatchers, the July full moon rises tonight! Here's everything you need to know about where and when to see the lunar spectacle, along with explanations of the rare cocktail of orbital characteristics that make the 2025 'Buck Moon' unmissable.

The full moon reaches peak illumination at 4:36 p.m. EDT (2036 GMT) on July 10 and will become visible when itrises over the southeastern horizon as the sun sets in the evening sky. The exact time that moonrise takes place — which is around 8:53 p.m. local time in New York — is determined by where you are on Earth, so be sure to check a trusted website like timeanddate.com or in-the-sky.org to get the right timings for your locale.

July's full moon is also called the Buck Moon, because it coincides with the time of year that male deer, known as bucks, begin growing out their antlers, but it goes by other names too. It's also called the full 'Thunder Moon', in reference to the early summer storms that occur around the time it rises, while some Europeans have dubbed it the 'Hay Moon' because it appears as farmers gather animal feed in the wake of their July harvest.

That's no (ordinary) moon

The July 2025 full 'Buck Moon' will give stargazers an opportunity to appreciate several distinct quirks of orbital mechanics at work! For starters, it falls close to the summer solstice, a time of the year when the sun rides particularly high in the sky, while the moon tracks a low path over the southern horizon.

This year, the July full moon's usual low-riding nature will be further exacerbated by a phenomenon called a 'Major Lunar Standstill', which occurs when the sun's gravity drags the moon's tilted orbit into its greatest inclination relative to Earth's 'celestial' equator. This causes the moon to travel an especially high — or low — path through the sky, depending on the time of year!

On top of that, July's 'Buck Moon' is the closest full moon to aphelion, the point in Earth's elliptical orbit when it is farthest from the sun. That means, July's full moon is the farthest from the sun in 2025, though that won't have any visible effect on the lunar spectacle.

What to look for when the full 'Buck Moon' graces the sky on July 10

During a full moon, Earth sits directly between the sun and the moon, allowing the entirety of the lunar surface to be lit from our perspective. That means no long shadows or dramatic relief like you see during quarter moon phases.

Even without shadows, the full moon offers a perfect opportunity to explore the dark expanses of the lunar seas, or maria, that formed billions of years ago when lava flooded the impact craters left by violent asteroid strikes and later cooled to form great basaltic plains. Bright streaks known as ejecta rays can also be spotted leading away from large impact sites — such as the vast Tycho crater scarring the south lunar region — where reflective material was excavated and cast out across the lunar surface during particularly violent events.

Beyond that, the full 'Buck Moon' will grant viewers a chance to retrace humanity's historic efforts to explore the lunar surface. July 2025 will mark the 56th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Using our handy guide, you can scope out each of the six Apollo-era crewed landing sites, using either the naked eye or, ideally, a 6-inch scope to reveal more details in the lunar landscape.

Don't forget to check out our Prime Day hub for all the best deals on everything space related, whether you're searching for a new telescopes or binoculars, star projectors or even board games, we've got you covered.

Editor's Note: If you capture a picture of the full 'Buck Moon' and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send it alongside your comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The July full moon 2025, also known as the Buck Moon, will rise tonight (July 10), offering a spectacular lunar show for skywatchers worldwide.

The moon will reach full illumination at 4:37 p.m. EDT (2037 GMT) on July 10, but this moment won't be visible everywhere. The best time to see the full moon depends on your local moonrise time.

For example, in New York City, the July full moon rises at 8:53 p.m. EDT on July 10, just 25 minutes after sunset at 8:28 p.m. In the northern mid-latitudes, such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Paris or Tokyo, long summer days mean later sunsets and moonrises.

Here are the local moonrise times for the full moon on July 10, according to timeanddate.com.

If you miss the full moon on July 10, don't worry, the moon will still appear full the night before and the night after.

Best time to look for the full moon

The full moon will look particularly impressive an hour or two after it rises above the southern horizon. This is thanks to the moon illusion, a visual trick that makes the moon look much bigger when it's near the horizon than when it's high overhead.

In reality, the moon's size doesn't change at all. The illusion comes from how our brains interpret visual cues, especially when comparing the moon to nearby objects like trees or buildings. When the moon is high in the sky, there's nothing next to it to provide a sense of scale, so it appears smaller than when it's low on the horizon and framed by familiar landmarks.

To get the best view of the full moon, try to head to a location with minimal light pollution and a clear view of the horizon. And don't forget to check your local weather forecast, as clouds could block the show.

Editor's Note: If you capture an amazing full moon photo and want to share it with Space.com for a story, please send images and comments to spacephotos@space.com.

A full moon occurs when the moon is positioned opposite the sun in the sky, causing it to appear fully lit from our perspective here on Earth.

The Buck Moon gets its name from the time of year in North America when male deer, known as bucks, begin to grow out their antlers. It's also sometimes called the 'Thunder Moon', in reference to the seasonal summer storms that often rumble across parts of the U.S. in July. The lunar milestone also occurs less than a week after Earth reached aphelion — the point in its orbit that is most distant from the Sun — making it the farthest full moon from the sun in 2025.

When to see the July full Buck Moon

This month's full moon will occur at 4:36 p.m. EDT (2036 GMT) on July 10, but it won't be visible until it rises above the southern horizon at sunset in your local time zone. In New York City, for example, moonrise occurs around 8:53 p.m. local time. Remember: the exact timings for moon phases vary depending on where you are on Earth, so be sure to check out a trusted website such as in-the-sky.org or timeanddate.com to get the correct timings for your locale.

Why the Buck Moon looks so low

July's full moon will look especially low in the sky after sunset. This is largely down to its proximity to the summer solstice, when the sun is at its highest in the daytime sky, and the moon tracks a correspondingly low path through the night.

This effect is even more extreme in 2025 thanks to a phenomenon known as a 'Major Lunar Standstill'. This occurs every 18.6 years, when the sun's gravity drags the moon's tilted orbit into its most extreme inclination relative to Earth's celestial equator. This causes the moon to appear especially high — or low — in Earth's sky depending on the time of year.

What to look for on July 10

The best time to view the July full moon will be in the hours following moonrise on July 10, when the lunar disk will appear larger than it actually is, thanks to the 'Moon Illusion'. This phenomenon occurs when the moon is positioned close to the horizon, at which point our brain tricks us into thinking that it is larger than it is when it is directly overhead, despite the fact that it takes up the same amount of space in the night sky at both positions!

You may also notice the Buck Moon take on a golden or reddish hue shortly after rising.. This warm hue is caused by Rayleigh scattering, the same effect that causes colorful sunsets and sunrises. It happens because sunlight reflected off the moon's surface has to travel farther through Earth's atmosphere to reach us when it's low on the horizon compared to when it's directly overhead, causing more light in the bluer wavelengths to scatter, while allowing redder wavelengths through.

Celebrate Apollo with a lunar look-back

This month also marks the 56th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon while Michael Collins watched on from lunar orbit. To celebrate, we invite you to locate each of the six historic Apollo-era landing sites on the lunar surface with the aid of our handy visual guide. It's possible to find the region visited by each Apollo mission with the naked eye, but a 6-inch telescope will help reveal details in the broken moonscapes and smooth lunar seas surrounding each of the landing zones.

Editor's Note: If you capture an image of the full 'Buck Moon' and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

On July 5, the moon's terminator, the line that separates lunar night from day, falls slightly to the west of the great circular plain Sinus Iridum (Latin for the 'Bay of Rainbows') in the northwest region of the lunar surface. At this time the sun is perfectly positioned to illuminate the eastern peaks of the vast Montes Jura mountain range bordering Sinus Iridum's northernmost edge, giving rise to a spectacular golden arc that has since become known as the "Golden Handle".

To find the Golden Handle, look for the waxing gibbous moon hanging above the southern horizon as the sun sets on June 5, shining among the stars of the constellation Libra. Then find the Montes Jura mountain range close to the terminator, above the dark expanse of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Showers) — a colossal lunar plain formed from solidified lava flows. There you will see a crescent-shaped curve near the terminator — the Golden Handle.

A pair of 15x70 binoculars mounted on a tripod will help reveal the sweeping profile of the Golden Handle, while a telescope with an aperture of 6 inches or greater will give you a more detailed view of Montes Jura and the nearby Bianchini Crater.

While you're exploring the moon, be sure to swing your scope over to Copernicus Crater. At about 57 miles (93 kilometers) wide, it makes for a striking lunar target. On July 5, the low angle of the sun will cast prominent shadows along the eastern rim of the impact crater, while highlighting reflective debris streaks known as ejecta rays that were cast out during its creation some 800 million years ago.

Stargazers looking to understand Earth’s natural satellite better should check out our ultimate guide to exploring the lunar surface, along with our guides to the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the solar system. Those interested in immortalizing their stargazing sessions should also read our roundup of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you capture an image of the 'Golden Handle' and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo or video, along with your name, location and comments to spacephotos@space.com.

Stargazers in the U.S. will find the waxing gibbous moon above the southwestern horizon as the sun sets on July 3, with Spica — the brightest star in the constellation Virgo — visible less than 2 degrees to the upper right of the lunar disk.

Remember, you can estimate distances in the night sky using your outstretched hand. The width of your pinky finger measured at the tip accounts for roughly 1 degree in the night sky. By the time the pair set below the horizon in the early hours of July 4, the moon will have shifted to Spica's left-hand side.

At a distance of 250 light-years from Earth, Spica appears to us as a single point of light in the night sky. In reality, it is a binary star system composed of two stellar bodies multiple times the size of the sun, which together shine roughly 12,100 times brighter than our parent star.

The moon orbits our Blue Marble at an average distance of just 238,860 miles (382,500 kilometers) — close enough for its apparent position to shift by up to 2 degrees relative to the starfield beyond, depending on where you are viewing from on Earth.

As such, a very small percentage of our planet's population will see the moon slide directly in front of Spica in the coming hours. This event, known as an occultation, will occur in the hours following 3:51 p.m. EDT (19:51 GMT) on July 3 and will be visible to stargazers situated in Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and the southernmost tips of Chile and Argentina.

Editor's Note: If you capture a shot of the moon and Spica together and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo, comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Kicking up dust and rocks, the Blue Ghost Mission-1's March 2 moon landing marked the start of executing NASA-backed Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) instruments.

The moon lander wrapped up more than 14 Earth days of surface operations (346 hours of daylight) and worked just over five hours into the super-chilly lunar night — checkmark accomplishments after performing the first fully successful commercial moon landing.

Deep dive

One of those investigations involved a distinctive deep dive into studying the interior of the moon.

Blue Ghost deployed four tethered Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) electrodes at 90-degree angles to each other onto the lunar surface, shot far from the lander's top deck. It also unleashed a tall, mast-mounted magnetometer that extended some 8 feet (2.4 meters) above the lunar surface to reduce interference from the lander and to work in tandem with the "shoot from the deck" electrodes.

LMS was designed to measure the moon's electric and magnetic fields. Developed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the instrument aimed to gather data that would reveal insights into the moon's mantle, revealing how it has cooled and chemically evolved since its formation.

The LMS payload was funded for delivery to the lunar surface through NASA's CLPS initiative.

SwRI designed the instrument, built its electronics box and led the science investigation. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland provided the LMS magnetometer to measure the magnetic fields, and Heliospace Corporation provided the magnetometer mast and four electrodes used to measure the electrical fields.

Wham, there it goes

"The data is shaping up," said SwRI's Robert Grimm, the LMS principal investigator. "The electrodes all worked," he told Space.com, adding that they arched some 80 feet (25 m) away from Blue Ghost to their respective landing spots.

While the core LMS technique is used every day on Earth, Grimm said it was the first extraterrestrial application of magnetotellurics. "And ours are laying on the surface of the moon."

On Earth, the method is used for finding oil, water, geothermal and mineral resources, as well as to understand geologic processes such as the growth of continents.

Grimm remembers awaiting the electrode deployments while sitting in a SwRI operations center.

"Then suddenly, wham, there it goes. It was a pretty exciting moment. There were a lot of high fives," said Grimm. All the deployments happened with the LMS team immediately starting to take test data.

"We got some really great swaths of high-rate data that are going to be the real heart of our experiment…the best data nuggets for us to analyze," said Grimm. LMS operated for 13 days, he said, with what was learned forthcoming in a few months.

Payload birthright

The road to the moon was a long one.

Indeed, the LMS payload's development goes back years, Grimm said, stemming from SwRI internal funding for prototype landing instruments for two icy ocean moons — Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus.

For the LMS proposal to NASA, Grimm said the team could point to heritage hardware that had been subjected to vibration and thermal-vacuum testing. "You are not going to be picked if you don't have hardware," Grimm said, "and writing proposals is like breathing for us."

Moreover, the team's moon instrument pitch put forward the idea of landing at Mare Crisium, Grimm recalled, "because it's outside where all the Apollo landings were. We wanted to look at a part of the moon that we thought would offer a different interior composition."

Once selected, and through a consensus process with NASA, Firefly Aerospace, and the other payload selectees, Blue Ghost was targeted for Mare Crisium.

Team building

Throughout the process of scoping out Blue Ghost's mission, deliberations were ongoing and focused on power needs, how long experiments would run, data requirements, baseline minimums and maximums, and other specifics.

"There was a team-building process. Maybe it happened naturally over that time. We got to know them, they got to know us," Grimm said, pointing out that the CLPS contract with Firefly Aerospace was geared to delivering science gathered on the lunar surface.

The Blue Ghost lunar lander was lofted moonward on Jan. 15, 2025 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

As an in-person viewer of the early morning liftoff from 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) away, "it was exciting and louder than I thought it would be. It made car alarms go off. But it didn't rattle the change in my pocket," said Grimm. "A person from SpaceX reminded us we're going to the moon from the Apollo launch pad!"

Themes and expressions

On moon landing day, "it was very smooth. Everything tracked all the way down," Grimm said.

Following the nearly two weeks of LMS operating on the moon, as sunset fell on the Blue Ghost machinery, the experiment was turned off. "It was a poignant moment," Grimm recalled. "We cracked a beer, made a toast, and that was it."

A number of moon research signals became evident to Grimm. For one, themes and expressions used around the Commercial Lunar Payload Services concept like "more shots on goal" and "FedEx to the moon" are bothersome, he said.

It's still hard

Given the CLPS lunar landings to date, and the less-than-hoped-for moon science produced, there's a high failure rate at work.

Also, the FedEx notion of simply bolting on your experiment and waiting for the data to roll in doesn't really hold.

"We thought that we were going to turn it on and that was going to be it. Instead, it was a rollercoaster the whole way," Grimm said.

"I'm hopeful that the CLPS is making progress. There's a half-dozen missions already cued up next," Grimm explained.

It's still spaceflight, Grimm stressed. "It's still hard. In some sense harder than it used to be because it has got to be done for so cheap. So it's hard."

And many moon mysteries remain, even how it was formed in the first place.

"The giant impact theory is and has been the leading theory. It explains more than anything else," said Grimm. However, he added, "anything in science is subject to revision if you get more and better data. We don't have all the answers as yet."

This month's first quarter phase occurs at 11:41 p.m. EDT on July 2 (0341 GMT on July 3), at which time the right side of the half-lit lunar disk will be illuminated by direct sunlight from the perspective of viewers in the northern hemisphere on Earth.

At this time, the sun shines at such an angle to make it appear as if there is a gigantic 'V' and 'X' marking the barren lunar surface. This kind of phenomenon is referred to as a 'clair-obscur' effect and occurs when the interplay between light and shadow leads to the chance formation of familiar shapes on the moon's craggy terrain.

How to spot the letters 'X' and 'V' marking the lunar surface

The lunar letters are visible for roughly four hours in the run-up to each first quarter moon phase and are at their most impressive when seen just on the 'night' side of the terminator, with their upper reaches kissed by the sun's light. Try and find the lunar 'X' and 'V' on the lunar disk at sunset on July 2 and be sure to keep checking back to see how these shapes evolve over time.

If you miss the letters on the night side of the terminator, there's no need to lose hope, as they'll continue to be visible for a brief period after they pass to the 'day side' of the moon.

The lunar X is an optical effect formed when sunlight strikes elevated rim sections of the Bianchini, Purbach and La Caille Craters around the first quarter moon phase, according to stargazing website EarthSky.org. The feature can be found around 25 degrees south of the lunar equator close to the terminator, which is the line separating the dayside and nightside of the moon, close to the prominent Werner and Aliacensis Craters.

To find the lunar 'V', moongazers must follow the line of the terminator up to a point less than 10 degrees above the lunar equator to find the partially shadowed form of the Ukert Crater. Both objects can be spotted through a small backyard telescope with a 6-inch aperture, though a larger scope will help resolve detail in the myriad craters and broken terrain dotting the surrounding moonscapes.

Stargazers interested in exploring the lunar surface should check out our guides to the best telescopes and binoculars available in 2025. Photographers interested in capturing the moon's surface should also read our roundup of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

This article was updated at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0810 GMT) on July 2 to change ‘June 2’ to the correct date of ‘July 2’ for the lunar event.

Editor's Note: If you capture a picture of the letters on the moon and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Stargazers in the U.S. will find the slender form of the crescent moon roughly 20 degrees above the western horizon right at sunset on Saturday. The following hour will see Mars and the bright star Regulus line up to the upper left of the lunar disk, becoming visible as dusk gives way to the coming night.

The trio will follow the sun below the horizon a mere three hours later, so be sure to catch the celestial alignment before it disappears!

The following night, Sunday (June 29), will see the waxing moon jump to the lower right of Mars, with its crescent form appearing to sweep underneath the Red Planet. The moon and Mars will pass within 1 degree of one another before slipping below the western horizon.

Some well-positioned viewers will witness the moon pass directly in front of Mars, blocking the planet from view, according to stargazing website in-the-sky.org. This phenomenon is known as an "occultation" and is only possible because of the moon's relative proximity to us, which can make its position shift by around 2 degrees in the night sky depending on where you're viewing it from on Earth.

The lunar occultation of Mars will be visible from parts of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Clipperton Island in the hours following 6:57 p.m. EDT (22:57 GMT) on June 29.

Night sky enthusiasts looking to capture the next big celestial alignment should check out our guides to the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography available in 2025. Those hoping to get a closer view of the cosmos should also read our roundup of the top telescopes and binoculars with which to explore the night sky.

Editor's Note: If you capture a picture of the moon with Regulus and Mars and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

"The results contribute to the safety case for returning humans to the moon," said Brian Oliver, who is a Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, in a statement.

Concerns about the toxicity of moon dust arose during the Apollo missions. Lunar dust is statically charged, allowing it to adhere to astronauts' space suits. After the astronauts clambered back inside their lunar lander following a moonwalk, the dust became airborne in the cabin and was inhaled, leading to the astronauts suffering respiratory problems that faded after about 24 hours. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt described it as like having "lunar hay fever," with stinging eyes, sneezing and a sore throat.

Moreover, back on Earth, the Apollo flight surgeon reported similar problems after unpacking the used spacesuits. In their case, they reported that the symptoms grew worse after every mission, suggesting that repeated exposure to lunar dust exacerbates its toxicity.

Nevertheless, the anecdotal evidence is not a quantitative measure of the potential harm that lunar dust can do to humans. So Michaela Smith, who is a PhD student at the University of Technology Sydney's Respiratory Research Group, set about finding out.

Smith performed experiments using two lunar simulants – replicas of real lunar dust, since samples of real lunar dust are limited – that are analogous to moon dust found in the moon's dark volcanic lowland plains and its more ancient highlands, respectively. The simulant particles are smaller than 2.5 microns (millionths of a meter), small enough to be inhaled and then trapped in the lower airways of the lungs. To represent lungs, Smith introduced the simulant dust to two different types of lung cell, namely bronchial and alveolar cells, representing the upper and lower regions of the lungs, respectively.

Smith then conducted the same experiment but with airborne particulate matter sampled from a busy Sydney street, and compared the effects of lunar dust with that of air pollution.

Smith found that while the irregular shape and roughness of the lunar dust still irritates the lungs, its effects are significantly less than that of air pollution.

"It's important to distinguish between a physical irritant and a highly toxic substance," said Smith. "Our findings suggest that while lunar dust may cause some immediate irritation to the airways, it does not appear to pose a risk for chronic, long-term diseases like silicosis, which is caused by materials like silica dust [as on a construction site, for example]."

This is good news for NASA, who are still taking the health challenges of moon dust seriously as they plan the Artemis 3 mission that will see humans return to the surface of the moon for the first time since 1972.

For example, one strategy is to have the astronaut's spacesuits affixed to the exterior of the lunar lander, and the astronauts enter and leave the suits through an airlock within the lander without bringing the moon dust stuck to the suits inside the cabin. However, thanks to Smith's work, the problem of moon dust is perhaps no longer quite as serious as had been anticipated.

Smith's findings have been published in Life Sciences in Space Research.

Stargazers in the U.S. can find the cosmic trio loitering above the eastern horizon in the hours preceding dawn on Sunday, June 22. Venus will be visible shining to the lower right of the sickle-like shape of the waning crescent moon, while the Pleiades open star cluster can be found less than 10 degrees (one fist's width at arm's length) to the lower left of the lunar disk.

The Pleiades will be the last of the three bodies to rise above the horizon at around 3.15 a.m. ET (0715 GMT) on June 22, and will be visible for a little over an hour before it becomes challenging to spot in the glare of the rising sun. As always the utmost care must be taken to never point telescopic equipment or binoculars close to the rising sun, as doing so can immediately and permanently damage your vision.

The strange cosmic triangle is a perfect example of the astounding variety of objects that are visible to the naked eye from Earth. The moon, for example, is a relatively small, barren world scarred by craters and dark lunar seas born of brutal asteroid bombardments that occurred billions of years ago. As the moon progresses through the different phases of the lunar calendar, the sun's light throws new impact sites, barren plains, and swathes of broken landscapes into relief as prime targets for amateur astronomers wielding binoculars and backyard telescopes.

Venus, meanwhile, is a rocky world that shares a similar size, mass and density with our planet, which has led to it being nicknamed 'Earth's twin'. However, telescopic and robotic observations are steadily unravelling the mystery of how the planet followed a radically different evolutionary path that saw a runaway greenhouse gas effect render it hostile to life as we know it. It is possible to observe the different phases of the Venutian disk - which are similar to the phases of the moon - using a telescope with a 60 mm aperture (or greater) with a minimum of 50x magnification, per telescope-maker Celestron.

The Pleiades star cluster (also known as Messier 45) is a different beast entirely — a gravitationally bound collection of over a thousand stars found within the Milky Way some 445 light-years from Earth in the Taurus constellation, according to NASA. The Pleiades are readily visible as a smudge of light to the naked eye under dark sky conditions, but a pair of 10x50 binoculars will help you witness their true nature, and distinguish individual stars. The view will become even more spectacular with the aid of a 6-inch telescope, revealing more of the dazzling blue-white stars.

Stargazers hoping to explore the wonders of the universe for themselves should check out our guide to the best telescopes and binoculars on offer in 2025. Photographers hoping to capture the next big astronomy event should also check out our roundup of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you capture an image of the moon with Venus and the Pleiades and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Resilience tried to touch down on June 5 in the center of Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold), a volcanic region interspersed with large-scale faults known as wrinkle ridges.

Mare Frigoris formed over 3.5 billion years ago as massive basalt eruptions flooded low-lying terrain, according to Mark Robinson, a lunar scientist for the company Intuitive Machines who is based in Phoenix, Arizona. Later, the wrinkle ridges formed as the crust buckled under the weight of the heavy basalt deposits.

Lost on landing

Shortly after Resilience's landing sequence, the ispace Mission Control Center was unable to establish communications with the spacecraft. The team determined that Resilience had likely been lost, a conclusion that was firmed up a few hours later.

Also lost on landing was the Tenacious microrover, a small wheeled vehicle developed in Luxembourg by ispace's European subsidiary. Tenacious carried a piece of artwork on its front bumper — Mikael Genberg's "Moonhouse," a small replica of the red-and-white homes famous in Sweden.

Dark smudge

Resilience left some telltale marks when it slammed into the moon on June 5, and LRO noticed them.

"The dark smudge formed as the vehicle excavated and redistributed shallow regolith (soil); the faint bright halo resulted from low-angle regolith particles scouring the delicate surface," Robinson, the principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, told Inside Outer Space.

Robinson told Inside Outer Space that the crash spot is roughly 1.5 miles (2,400 meters) from the one decimal place pre-landing ispace web page of latitude and longitude. One degree is 30 kilometers, so one decimal of that would be three kilometers, or roughly 2 miles.

Resilience was ispace's second moon lander. The company's first such probe also crashed during its touchdown try, in April 2023.

Scott Manley has more details on the Resilience crash; check out his video here.

April 2025 was a busy month for space.

Pop icon Katy Perry joined five other civilian women on a quick jaunt to the edge of space, making headlines. Meanwhile, another group of people at the United Nations was contemplating a critical issue for the future of space exploration: the discovery, extraction and utilization of natural resources on the moon.

At the end of April, a dedicated Working Group of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space released a draft set of recommended principles for space resource activities. Essentially, these are rules to govern mining on the moon, asteroids and elsewhere in space for elements that are rare here on Earth.

As a space lawyer and co-founder of For All Moonkind, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting human heritage in outer space, I know that the moon could be the proving ground for humanity’s evolution into a species that lives and thrives on more than one planet. However, this new frontier raises complex legal questions.

Space, legally

Outer space – including the moon – from a legal perspective, is a unique domain without direct terrestrial equivalent. It is not, like the high seas, the “common heritage of humankind,” nor is it an area, like Antarctica, where commercial mining is prohibited.

Instead, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty – signed by more than 115 nations, including China, Russia and the United States – establishes that the exploration and use of space are the “province of all humankind.” That means no country may claim territory in outer space, and all have the right to access all areas of the moon and other celestial bodies freely.

The fact that, pursuant to Article II of the treaty, a country cannot claim territory in outer space, known as the nonappropriation principle, suggests to some that property ownership in space is forbidden.

Can this be true? If your grandchildren move to Mars, will they never own a home? How can a company protect its investment in a lunar mine if it must be freely accessible by all? What happens, as it inevitably will, when two rovers race to a particular area on the lunar surface known to host valuable water ice? Does the winner take all?

As it turns out, the Outer Space Treaty does offer some wiggle room. Article IX requires countries to show “due regard” for the corresponding interests of others. It is a legally vague standard, although the Permanent Court of Arbitration has suggested that due regard means simply paying attention to what’s reasonable under the circumstances.

First mover advantage – it’s a race

The treaty’s broad language encourages a race to the moon. The first entity to any spot will have a unilateral opportunity to determine what’s legally “reasonable.” For example, creating an overly large buffer zone around equipment might be justified to mitigate potential damage from lunar dust.

On top of that, Article XII of the Outer Space Treaty assumes that there will be installations, like bases or mining operations, on the moon. Contrary to the free access principle, the treaty suggests that access to these may be blocked unless the owner grants permission to enter.

Both of these paths within the treaty would allow the first person to make it to their desired spot on the moon to keep others out. The U.N. principles in their current form don’t address these loopholes.

The draft U.N. principles released in April mirror, and are confined by, the language of the Outer Space Treaty. This tension between free access and the need to protect – most easily by forbidding access – remains unresolved. And the clock is ticking.

The moon's vulnerable legacy

The U.S. Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon by 2028, China has plans for human return by 2030, and in the intervening years, more than 100 robotic missions are planned by countries and private industry alike. For the most part, these missions are all headed to the same sweet spot: the lunar south pole. Here, peaks of eternal light and deep craters containing water ice promise the best mining, science and research opportunities.

In this excitement, it’s easy to forget that humans already have a deep history of lunar exploration. Scattered on the lunar surface are artifacts displaying humanity’s technological progress.

After centuries of gazing at our closest celestial neighbor with fascination, in 1959 the Soviet spacecraft, Luna 2, became the first human-made object to impact another celestial body. Ten years later, two humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, became the first ever to set foot upon another celestial body.

More recently, in 2019, China’s Chang’e 4 achieved the first soft landing on the moon’s far side. And in 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first to land successfully near the lunar south pole.

These sites memorialize humanity’s baby steps off our home planet and easily meet the United Nations definition of terrestrial heritage, as they are so “exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.”

The international community works to protect such sites on Earth, but those protection protocols do not extend to outer space.

The more than 115 other sites on the Moon that bear evidence of human activity are frozen in time without degradation from weather, animal or human activity. But this could change. A single errant spacecraft or rover could kick up abrasive lunar dust, erasing bootprints or damaging artifacts.

Protection and the Outer Space Treaty

In 2011, NASA recommended establishing buffer, or safety zones, of up to 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) to protect certain sites with U.S. artifacts.

Because it understood that outright exclusion violates the Outer Space Treaty, NASA issued these recommendations as voluntary guidelines. Nevertheless, the safety zone concept, essentially managing access to and activities around specific areas, could be a practical tool for protecting heritage sites. They could act as a starting point to find a balance between protection and access.

One hundred and ninety-six nations have agreed, through the 1972 World Heritage Convention, on the importance of recognizing and protecting cultural heritage of universal value found here on Earth.

Building on this agreement, the international community could require specific access protocols — such as a permitting process, activity restrictions, shared access rules, monitoring and other controls — for heritage sites on the Moon. If accepted, these protective measures for heritage sites could also work as a template for scientific and operational sites. This would create a consistent framework that avoids the perception of claiming territory.

At this time, the draft U.N. principles released in April 2025 do not directly address the opposing concepts of access and protection. Instead, they defer to Article I of the Outer Space Treaty and reaffirm that everyone has free access to all areas of the Moon and other celestial bodies.

As more countries and companies compete to reach the Moon, a clear lunar legal framework can guide them to avoid conflicts and preserve historical sites. The draft U.N. principles show that the international community is ready to explore what this framework could look like.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Saturn, the moon and Neptune will be at their closest in Earth's sky at 9:11 p.m. EDT on June 18 (0111 GMT on June 19), at which time the trio will be separated by a mere 2.58 degrees while below the horizon for those in the U.S., according to stargazing website in-the-sky.org. Remember, it's possible to measure distances by holding your hand at arms length against the night sky. The width of the tip of your little finger accounts for 1 degree in the night sky, while the width of your clenched fist measures roughly 10 degrees.

The best time to spot the solar system alignment will come during the early morning hours on June 19, at around 1:30 am EDT for viewers in New York, when the giant planets rise alongside the moon on the eastern horizon. The exact time that the trio will become visible will vary depending on your location, so be sure to check a trusted source such as the Stellarium smartphone app to get precise timings for your locale.

The half-lit form of the third quarter moon will be the first to rise, with Saturn following shortly after, visible as a bright morning star a little under 4 degrees to the lower right of the lunar disk. The ice giant Neptune - too dim to spot with the naked eye - will be positioned roughly 1 degree to the upper left of Saturn and can be observed using a telescope with an aperture of 8-inches (200 mm) or greater, according to telescope-maker Celestron.

In the following days, Earth's natural satellite will leave the giant planets behind as it tracks a path towards Venus, with its disk growing ever thinner as it approaches its new moon phase on June 25. Saturn and Neptune meanwhile will remain close to each other in Earth's sky over the coming months.

Stargazers looking to explore the planets of our solar system for themselves should check out our guides to the best binoculars and telescope deals available in 2025. Photographers hoping to upgrade their gear ahead of the next celestial alignment should also read up on our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you capture an image of the moon with Neptune and Saturn and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), name, shooting location and comments to spacephotos@space.com.

Japanese automaker Honda successfully launched and landed a prototype reusable rocket on Tuesday (June 17), marking a big step toward future spaceflight capabilities.

The 56-second vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) test took place Tuesday at Honda's facility in Taiki, Hokkaido, often dubbed Japan's "space town." The rocket, developed by Honda R&D, reached an altitude of 271.4 meters (890 feet) and touched down just 37 centimeters (14.6 inches) from its target, according to a company statement.

The experimental reusable rocket measures approximately 20.7 feet in length (6.3 meters) and 33.5 inches (85 centimeters) in diameter. It has a dry weight of 1,984 pounds (900 kilograms) and a wet weight of 2,893 pounds (1,312 kg), according to Honda's statement.

Honda said it achieved its intended objectives for the launch and landing while obtaining data during the ascent and descent. The company will next work toward a suborbital launch, though the program's commercial future is unknown.

"Although Honda rocket research is still in the fundamental research phase, and no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies, Honda will continue making progress in the fundamental research with a technology development goal of realizing technological capability to enable a suborbital launch by 2029," the company said.

The carmaker revealed back in 2021 that it aims to go seriously off-road, announcing a successful combustion test for its reusable engine for the experimental rocket. The company has also partnered with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to explore technologies needed for human space exploration.

The company joins a number of other rocket firms emerging in Japan, including Interstellar Technologies and Space One, the latter of which suffered two launch failures last year. Meanwhile, Innovative Space Carrier (ISC) plans to conduct its own hop test later this year.

The Texas-based company, which successfully operated its Blue Ghost lander on the lunar surface earlier this year, announced today (June 18) that it's working on a new moon project: a "lunar imaging service" called Ocula.

"Powered by a constellation of Elytra vehicles in lunar orbit, and eventually Mars orbit, Ocula will provide critical data that informs future human and robotic missions and supports national security with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance," Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in an emailed statement. "This service will fill a void for our nation with advanced lunar imaging capabilities and a sustainable commercial business model."

Firefly is developing its Elytra vehicle for a variety of uses in Earth orbit and deep space, including the region around the moon. The Ocula project will equip Elytra probes with high-resolution telescopes developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility in the California Bay Area.

These scopes will be able to resolve features as small as 8 inches (20 centimeters) on the lunar surface from an altitude of 31 miles (50 kilometers), according to Firefly.

"With ultraviolet and visible spectrum capabilities, the telescopes are designed to support situational awareness of other objects in cislunar space, enable fine-grained lunar surface details and identify concentrations of ilmenite, which indicates the presence of helium-3," Firefly representatives wrote in the emailed statement. (Helium-3, a potential fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors, is thought to be more abundant on the moon than it is on Earth.)

Ocula data could also help researchers and planners select landing sites for future robotic or crewed missions, the company added. Firefly aims to license the data to both government and commercial customers.

If all goes according to plan, Ocula will kick off next year, on the second Blue Ghost lunar landing mission. An Elytra with an LLNL scope will serve as the transfer vehicle for that mission, which will put Blue Ghost down on the moon's far side (and also deliver a European Space Agency probe to lunar orbit).

Elytra will serve as a communications relay for Blue Ghost and its payloads for the duration of the lander's roughly two-week-long surface mission. After those duties are done, Elytra will begin its Ocula work, imaging the lunar surface in detail for more than five years.

Another scope-equipped Elytra will launch in 2028, on the third Blue Ghost mission. And other spacecraft will follow in the ensuing years, if all goes to plan.

"Firefly will expand its constellation of Elytra vehicles in lunar orbit to further enhance the Ocula service and enable faster revisit times for situational awareness, resource detection and mission planning," Firefly wrote in the statement. "Longer term, the service can also be extended to Mars and other planetary bodies."

China is advancing the development of the technology it needs to try to beat NASA back to the moon.

The China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) completed a pad abort test of its Mengzhou spacecraft today (June 17), marking another step forward in its efforts to send Chinese astronauts, or taikonauts, to the lunar surface for the first time. The zero-altitude escape sequence was initiated at 12:30 p.m. Beijing time (12:30 a.m. EDT; 0430 GMT), from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China.

With just the Mengzhou spacecraft on the pad (no rocket), the solid rocket escape engines on the capsule's abort tower fired for approximately 20 seconds, according to CMSEO. At altitude, Mengzhou's escape tower was jettisoned, and a trio of parachutes guided the spacecraft safely back to the desert surface, touching down with an airbag cushion at 12:32 p.m. BJT (12:32 a.m. EDT; 0432 GMT). CMSEO called the test "a complete success."

Tests like this allow spacecraft engineers to verify safety systems of new spacecraft without putting crews' lives on the line. In the event of an in-flight emergency during an actual launch, Mengzhou's capsule escape tower is designed to propel the spacecraft away from the rocket in order to put a safe distance between the crew and potential disaster.

The capability has been built into nearly every spacecraft designed to transport crews since the beginning of spaceflight. NASA's Orion spacecraft, responsible for ferrying astronauts to the moon as a part of the U.S. space agency's Artemis program, underwent a similar test in 2019.

While China is slightly behind in its progress, the nation's efforts to beat the U.S. back to the moon may be gaining momentum just as NASA's own plans for a lunar return run into a speed bump.

The White House's proposed 2026 NASA budget leaves much of the Artemis program's future in question. For example, it calls for the cancellation of Orion and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket responsible for launching the spacecraft after the Artemis 3 moon-landing mission, which is currently targeted for 2027.

The likely next step for Mengzhou will be an in-flight abort test, carried higher in altitude by one of China's Long March rockets. The country is developing the Long March 10 for Mengzhou's operational missions, which will be capable of flying crews to low Earth orbit and orbit around the moon in conjunction with its Lanyue lunar lander, which is also under development.

"We've had these samples for 50 years, but we now have the technology to fully understand them," said Ryan Ogliore, a physics professor at Washington University in St Louis, in a statement. "Many of these instruments would have been unimaginable when the beads were first collected."

The tiny beads, less than a millimeter in size, are embedded in lunar rocks and mixed into the lunar regolith. They come in two varieties, orange and black, and were produced when drops of lava in plumes that violently erupted out of volcanoes cooled quickly in the cold vacuum on the lunar surface. Around 3.5 billion years ago, the the moon was drastically volcanically active, forming the dark patches of the lunar maria that today form the "face" of the "Man in the Moon."

"The beads are tiny, pristine capsules of the lunar interior," said Ogliore. "They're some of the most amazing extraterrestrial samples we have."

Ogliore was part of a team led by Thomas Williams, Stephen Parman and Alberto Saal of Brown University in Rhode Island, who deployed a variety of modern microscopic analysis techniques on the beads to learn more about the volcanic conditions in which the beads formed.

The main instrument used was a NanoSIMS 50 ion microprobe at Washington University, which can perform spectrometry at the atomic scale, identifying elements and isotopes, and probing nano-scale structure.

To avoid the subject material being exposed to Earth's atmosphere and reacting with its oxygen, the ion beam cored into the samples, extracting the beads from within them, and then taking care that the material was protected from our atmosphere. The samples were then subjected to a number of analysis techniques, including atom probe tomography, scanning-electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.

"Even with the advanced techniques we used, these were very difficult measurements to make," said Ogliore.

The measurements told the team about the pressure, temperature and chemistry of the environment that the beads formed in. Indeed, their very existence is proof that the moon had explosive eruptions, "something like the fire fountains that you can see in Hawaii today," said Ogliore.

Yet the color, shape and chemical composition of the lunar glass beads are quite unlike their terrestrial counterparts.

The analysis showed that the glass beads are coated in a layer less than 100 nanometers thick, deposited on the beads as vapor condensed out of the volcanic clouds. As such, probing these nano-layers provides information about those volcanic clouds, from which we can learn more about lunar volcanism.

The nano-layers on the surface of the beads are not smooth, but feature a number of shapes and inhomogeneities described as "micromounds," "lathes," "plaques" and "blebs." The micromounds in particular have a base that is richer in iron than their upper surfaces. This iron gradient is connected to how the pressure in the volcanic plume rapidly decreased in the brief time that it took for the micromounds in the nano-layer to be deposited.

Both the black and orange beads studied in this analysis were recovered by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 — the only mission to fly with a specialist geologist, Harrison Schmitt, on board — from the Taurus-Littrow Valley in Mare Serenitatis.

The black beads are abundant in zinc-sulfide nanocrystals, and thermochemical modeling of these beads indicates that hydrogen and sulfur were the major elements in the volcanic gas plumes that formed them. Meanwhile, the orange beads lack notable quantities of zinc-sulfide crystals. This suggests a change over time in the conditions of the volcanic eruption that produced the black and orange beads.

"It's like reading the journal of an ancient lunar volcanologist," said Ogliore.

Although the findings are only a small detail in the grand scheme of things, they take us a step closer to understanding the volcanic conditions that formed the Man in the Moon, and why that volcanism occurred in the first place.

The results were published online in April in the journal Icarus.

Mars travels a little more than half of its orbit each Earth year, and thus has oppositions (that point in the sky where it appears directly opposite to the sun in the sky) every two years plus about 50 days (its "synodic period," which is also the longest for any known planet). Prior to 2025, the last opposition of Mars was on Dec. 8, 2022; after 2025, the next will come on Feb. 19, 2027. It reached opposition this year on Jan. 16 and two nights earlier, on Jan. 14, a nearly full moon passed directly in front of Mars as seen from much of North America.

Mars is the most Earth-like planet of all known beyond our own, and it passed closest to Earth during the American morning of Jan. 12, just 3.5 days before opposition.

An "off year" for the Red Planet

But the 2025 apparition of Mars has been one of the poorer and more distant ones in the planet's 15-to-17-year cycle of oppositions near and far. Just three months after opposition, Mars arrived at aphelion (farthest from the sun) in its eccentric orbit, so we came no closer than 59.7 million miles (96.1 million kilometers) to it last winter — some 5.3 light minutes away. Shining with a yellow-orange hue, it attained its peak brightness, gleaming at magnitude -1.3. That's just a trifle fainter than Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

Ever since Jan. 12, however, it has been receding from Earth, and consequently it has gradually been getting dimmer. So, we're leaving it behind, and ever since Feb. 24, Mars has been traveling in prograde (eastward) motion — a long, straight line around the sky, becoming steadily farther away and smaller. Still, in spite of its fade-down, it continued to put on an eye-catching show during February and March with the "twin stars" of Gemini, Pollux and Castor as the brightest member of a prominent, albeit temporary, triangle.

And then, on the evening of May 4, Mars made a very close pass near the Beehive Star Cluster (M44), a very pretty sight as viewed through binoculars or a low-power, wide-field telescope.

And during the latter part of June, Mars will again make for a couple of eye-catching shows, teaming up first with a bright star and then, late this month, with Earth's nearest neighbor in space.

A close conjunction with Regulus

Mars now appears as nothing more than a featureless dot in most telescopes. But on Tuesday evening (June 17), it forms a wonderful naked-eye pairing with the thin, only slightly brighter star Regulus in the constellation of Leo the Lion. Observers in the Americas will see the planet and star 2 degrees apart or less from June 13 through June 20, and one degree or less apart June 15 through June 18.

For viewers, around 40 degrees north latitude, Regulus and Mars are side by side, only 1.5 degrees apart on June 14, and Mars is 45 arc minutes (three quarters of one degree) almost straight above Regulus on June 17. That will be the evening when they are closest together. Neither one is exceptionally bright; Regulus shines at magnitude +1.34 and Mars is at magnitude +1.41. But the fact that they will appear so near to each other and are so closely matched in brightness will make them appear to stand out in the early evening sky.

Look for them around 10 p.m. local daylight time, roughly one-quarter up in the western sky. In addition to their closeness to each other, look for the orange-gold of Mars and blue-white of Regulus to appear intensified by contrast to each other when they are so close together (as seen with the naked eye or binoculars).

Don't miss this near miss!

On Sunday evening, June 29, a waxing crescent moon, 24% illuminated by the sun, will pass very close to Mars and make for a rather attractive sight, low in the western sky at dusk. The moon, moving around Earth in an easterly direction at roughly its own diameter each hour, will appear to pass just below the orange-gold planet. Even though North America will miss out on seeing the moon pass directly in front of Mars (called an "occultation"), Mars will attract attention as it slowly appears to glide above the moon.

The view of the moon occulting Mars will be restricted to parts of Ecuador and Peru.

After closest approach, the moon will move slowly away from Mars. Locations to the east (or to the right) of a line running roughly from central Texas through central Ontario will be in various stages of twilight at the moment that the moon and planet are closest together (called a "conjunction").

To the west (or to the right) of that line, the sun will be above the horizon when the two are in conjunction, but will still appear relatively close as darkness falls. For places where the two are closest together within an hour or less after sunset, you'll probably initially need binoculars to pick Mars out against the bright twilight sky.

Once the sky has sufficiently darkened, however, Mars will be relatively easy to see. For most locations, the upper limb of the moon will skim to within about 20 arc minutes (one-third of a degree) of Mars. For places across the northern U.S. and Canada, the gap between the two will be a bit larger, while across the southern U.S. and the Caribbean, the gap will be a bit smaller.

The table below (calculated exclusively for Space.com by Joe Rao) provides the specific details for 15 selected cities in the U.S. and Canada.

The table gives civil times (all p.m.) of Mars' closest approach to the edge of the moon's upper limb. Separation between Mars and the moon's upper edge is given in terms of minutes of arc (the apparent width of the moon on June 29 is 31 arc minutes), and the percentage of the apparent width of the moon. A value of 0.48, for example, is equal to 48% of the moon's width (or fractionally, slightly less than one-half).

Examples: from Miami, closest approach between Mars and the moon is at 10:13 p.m. EDT. Separation is 15 arc minutes or 0.48, which is just under one-half of a moon's width from Mars to the upper edge of the moon. From New York, closest approach is at 9:48 p.m. EDT, the separation is listed at 23 arc minutes or 0.74, which means that 74% of the moon's width will separate Mars from the moon's upper edge.

Where do we go from here?

After its rendezvous with the moon, Mars will continue to press on to the east. In the weeks and months that follow, Mars will continue to be a fixture in the evening sky, but will continue to recede from Earth and consequently will get fainter, diminishing to the rank of second magnitude.

Passing north of Spica on Sept. 13 and Mercury on Oct. 19, Mars will be getting progressively lower in the sky — more southerly and nearer to the sunset. When it finally fades into the evening twilight glow of early November, it will be on the far side of the sun, some 225 million miles (362 million km) from Earth and just 1/13 as bright as it was in mid-January. It will finally end its run as an evening object when it will be at conjunction with the sun next year, on Jan. 9.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope and other publications.

What is it?

The RASSOR (Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot) is a remotely operated mobile robot designed to excavate rocks and dust from the moon. In its latest test, the RASSOR creates a three-foot long berm in the simulated lunar dust.

Where is it?

NASA tested its latest RASSOR at the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Lab at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in late May 2025.

Why is it amazing?

The RASSOR's lightweight frame has a pair of counterrotating drums that allow the robot to minimize its reaction force. This makes it easier for the robot to work in low gravity environments, like that on the moon. Its symmetrical design also enables the robot to move in reverse, which can help avoid overturning as it can dig its way out, according to NASA.

Excavating robots like RASSOR are key for helping to sustain a presence on the moon, as the rocks and dust can be used to construct materials or be broken down into molecules like oxygen and water.

According to a NASA statement, this recent test focused on whether the rotating excavation drums could be used to build a structure out of the simulated lunar dust.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about NASA's RASSOR program and studying lunar dust as humanity looks to return to the moon.

For the same reasons, though, space may be the perfect place to study cancer — and someday even treat it.

This year, tumors grown in laboratories on Earth are headed to the ISS as part of the first research project to use artificial organs for cancer testing in space. Scientists at Wake Forest University are working to develop cancer-screening tests that are faster and more sensitive. But the greater significance of their experiment may be as a trial run for a raft of other biomedical projects planned for low-gravity environments that spur cell growth.

"Microgravity is an accelerator of conditions. Every disease, every phenotype — everything we want to study can happen faster in less time," says Davide Marotta, program director for In-Space Biomanufacturing at the ISS National Laboratory. "Instead of waiting 10 months, you can go up [to space] in 10 days" to see the same biological effects, he adds.

On Earth, gravity slows the development of cancer because cells normally need to be attached to a surface in order to function and grow. But in space, cancer cell clusters can expand in all directions as bubbles, like budding yeast or grapes, said Shay Soker, chief science program officer at Wake Forest's Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Since bubbles grow larger and more quickly in space, researchers can more easily test substances clinging to the edge of the larger bubbles, too. Scientists at the University of Notre Dame are taking advantage of this quirk to develop an in-space cancer test that needs just a single drop of blood. The work builds on a series of bubble-formation experiments that have already been conducted on the ISS.

"If cancer screening using our bubble technology in space is democratized and made inexpensive, many more cancers can be screened, and everyone can benefit," said Tengfei Luo, a Notre Dame researcher who pioneered the technology, speaking to the ISS' magazine, Upward. "It's something we may be able to integrate into annual exams. It sounds far-fetched, but it's achievable."

Protecting astronauts from the health risks of space travel is another key priority for biomedical researchers working with NASA. On the ISS and other space missions, astronauts not only have to deal with all of the physiological changes associated with microgravity, but also the dangers of cosmic radiation, which can mutate DNA in human cells.

Astronaut Frank Rubio holds the NASA record for the longest continuous time spent in space at 371 days, with Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov holding the overall record with 437 consecutive days — a venture he volunteered for to prove humans could survive the time it would take to travel to and from Mars. But NASA's general rule is that astronauts should try to minimize their time in orbit to reduce health risks.

"For astronauts returning to Earth, they have difficulty just moving around," said Ben Soares, who studies space medicine at Boston University. "Even sitting in a chair involves muscles. Everything just falls apart when you don't use it."

A study of astronaut twins Scott and Mark Kelly found that Scott aged faster than his brother, who remained on Earth while Scott was in space. Microgravity also altered Scott's genetics, switching certain genes on or off.

Cancer risks are likely higher for astronauts, too, and not only because radiation can cause mutations in DNA. Cell membranes are held up by small proteins called microtubules that keep the cell's shape rigid, but when the gravitational force changes — even though gravity on the ISS is only 10% weaker than on Earth — the cell's structure changes with it.

On Earth, microtubule spindles ensure that a cell's chromosome replicates the structure. But microgravity distorts microtubules and can lead to irregular cell division, making cancer more likely.

"You may think [astronauts] are just floating around in space, but all those microtubules, and the major deformations in the outer membranes, change rapidly when there's microgravity exposure," said Soares. "People are wondering more and more whether changes are happening at an actual genetic level."

Again, though, these genetic effects also create unique opportunities for researchers seeking new diagnostic tests and treatments. For example, if scientists can pinpoint which genes are switched off in microgravity, then they might be able to activate them or deactivate them artificially for cancer patients on Earth.

Pharmaceutical research could benefit, too. In orbit, drug companies could drastically speed up a review and testing process that usually takes many years before the Food and Drug Administration approves the treatment. As the cost of in-orbit testing falls, it could become a key way to quickly evaluate all sorts of medications without having to spend years waiting to see if they work on diverse populations, according to the ISS National Laboratory's Marotta.

"Every person has a different response to the same drug," Marotta said. "We have drug resistance, failure of therapies, etc. Meanwhile, space costs will be lower and lower in the future."

Chemotherapy patients could save precious time, too. In normal gravity, they typically have to spend a half-hour hooked up to a needle before the medicine begins to take effect, because most drugs don't dissolve easily in water. But scientists at Merck have discovered that, in space, their widely used cancer drug pembrolizumab, or Keytruda, can be administered through a simple injection, because large crystalline molecules that would normally clump together are suspended in microgravity.

So far, though, Merck hasn't been able to find a way to administer its drug via injection on Earth. Similarly, the blood test developed by Notre Dame researchers only works in space, with no ability yet to simulate low gravity effectively here on Earth.

These limitations raise the question of whether patients might someday be treated in space to take advantage of lower gravity. It's not a completely far-fetched idea, according to Soker, though he acknowledged that it is prohibitively expensive for now. The ISS currently houses just seven astronauts, and SpaceX apparently charges space tourists approximately $55 million for a three- to eight-day trip into low Earth orbit. The hope is that those costs will come down drastically in the future.

The next big step, according to Soker, would be an orbiting facility dedicated to researching treatments for cancer and other debilitating conditions. "Maybe we can actually figure out which patients are the ones who are going to benefit from the space environment," he says. "If you're going to put several million dollars [into cancer treatment], I mean, you need to actually be sure that this is going to be helpful for you."

Someday, microgravity could even help patients recovering from surgery heal faster than they would on Earth, Soker added. "Wound healing in high pressure is faster. That's the hyperbaric treatment for wounds."

Before they can dream of a new generation of orbiting laboratories, though, researchers are under pressure to make the most of the one they have now — but won't be able to use for much longer. The ISS is set for destruction in 2031, after more than three decades in orbit, giving scientists only a handful of additional years to conduct their tests in the hopes of medical breakthroughs. "It's run its course," says Soker.

The key task now, he said, is for teams like his to deliver practical research results that could unlock funding for the next phase of biomedical research in space. Researchers are already benefiting from a recent increase in support thanks to the U.S. government's Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which funnels research dollars into techniques to help Earth-bound patients as well as astronauts.

For the Wake Forest experiment, which is scheduled to launch next spring, scientists will cut out two sections of a cancer tumor from around 20 patients. One sample will stay on Earth while the other heads to the ISS, with scientists observing the difference. The testing will be completed within a week, to avoid any interference from cosmic radiation.

If successful, Soker said, it could set the stage for diagnostic cancer tests in space available to the general population — perhaps on a biomedical space station that could launch after the planned demise of the ISS.

"Can we actually design a special cancer space station that will be dedicated to cancer and maybe other diseases?" Shoker asked, answering his question in the affirmative. "Pharmaceutical companies that have deep pockets would certainly support that program."

Right now, lunar landers are costly, especially when they fail. Rather than using landers for deliveries to the moon's surface, Charis Kosmas has developed a concept called the Momentum Absorption Catcher for Express Deliveries on Non-Atmospheric Somata (MACEDONAS).

It works like a butterfly net on bungee cords. "The Macedonian system consists of two elements: the catcher and the decelerator," Kosmas told Space.com. After the catcher intercepts the package, the attached decelerator slows the package until it reaches the landing pad.

With this idea, Kosmas wants to solve a few issues. When a lunar lander ascends to the surface of the moon, it uses rocket propulsion, which shoots up moon dust, or regolith. This highly abrasive dust can damage spacesuits, spacecraft and equipment. With MACEDONAS, regolith won't get kicked up during landing.

MACEDONAS is also economical, Kosmas said, because it doesn't use fuel. And because there's no fuel requirement, there's also no propulsion system, so MACEDONAS has more room for whatever is being delivered. "It will triple the efficiency," he said.

Rolling on the lunar surface

But MACEDONAS represents only the second stage in the lunar delivery system that Kosmas has envisioned with his company, Lunar Cargo. For the first step, a lunar orbiter would launch a giant wheel of wire at the moon. The wheel, called Oversized Payload Lander on Non-Atmospheric Somata (OPLONAS), would consist of flexible wire with a sealed cylinder tube at the wheel's center, which would hold a motor, batteries and cargo space.

OPLONAS would start out aboard an orbiter. "It will be launched in a package, in a storage form," Kosmas said. Then, using centrifugal force from the motor, "it will spin up when it arrives in low lunar orbit."

Upon landing, the wire wheel would flex with the moon's rough surface. "The outward forces will create a shielding against imperfections in the terrain," Kosmas explained. Then, OPLONAS would use the onboard motor to drive the delivery to its destination. "Being so large, it would be very efficient to roll without much friction," he added.

After the delivery, the sealed cylinder at the wheel's center could be flipped on its side and turned into a human habitat. "We need a lot of energy in order to spin up this structure, so we need batteries," Kosmas said. "These batteries will function now to protect the inhabitants of the habitat during the night."

The flexible wire from OPLONAS could then be upcycled to create most of the components needed to build MACEDONAS. "So, the concepts fit together in that sense," Kosmas said. "I like the idea of using simple material because it has many uses."

Making money on the moon

The lunar deliveries Kosmas envisions for MACEDONAS lie mostly in the future, as government agencies like NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are working with private companies to plan what an economy on the moon would look like.

Mining for resources will likely play an important role in this new economy. Aside from mining for lunar water, these efforts might involve the extraction of an isotope called helium-3, which is scarce on Earth but is in relatively large abundance on the moon.

If helium-3 can be mined and sent to Earth in a cost-effective way, it could become an important new energy source. Companies like U.S.-based Interlune and Japan-based ispace have already set their sights on helium-3 mining operations on the moon.

These mining operations would require heavy machinery. Kosmas wants mining companies like Interlune to use his delivery system to get their equipment to the moon. He said OPLONAS and MACEDONAS would be more efficient than lunar landers.

Kosmas' next step is to create a U.S. entity so he can apply for funding from U.S. agencies like NASA and DARPA. If he can secure funding and build the system, we might begin to see mining companies use giant butterfly nets to get their equipment to the moon's surface.

Kosmas will present his concept at the VivaTech event in Paris in June 2025.

What is it?

On June 11, 2025, SpaceX's X account posted this photo of the Dragon spacecraft basking in the light of the June full moon. Dragon is the only spacecraft currently flying that can return large cargo from the International Space Station to Earth, according to SpaceX. It is large enough to carry seven passengers on its voyages.

Where is it?

The private spacecraft sits on Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on the coast of Florida.

Why is it amazing?

This year, June's full moon is the lowest it has been in nearly two decades, due to a process known as "major lunar standstill". This happens during a two-year period when the moon's orbit is the most tilted compared to Earth's celestial equator, essentially Earth's equator projected into space. This standstill causes the moon to rise and set higher and lower in the horizon than normal.

June's moon also has something extra, as it's considered a "Strawberry Moon." This name was given due to the corresponding farming season of picking strawberries, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac.

The luminosity of the full moon comes from its position as it sits directly opposite from the sun in relation to Earth, and can fully reflect its light back down onto our planet.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about June's full moon as well as SpaceX's Dragon as a busy summer gets underway.

June's full moon rides surprisingly low across the southern sky thanks to a rare phenomenon known as a major lunar standstill, which occurs when the sun's gravitational influence drags the moon's tilted orbit into its greatest inclination relative to our planet's celestial equator. During this time, the moon's orbit is at its most extreme, causing it to ride unusually low — or high — across the sky depending on the time of year, while rising and setting at its most southerly and northerly points on the horizon.

Despite being the brightest object in the night sky, Earth's moon can be a surprisingly tricky target to spot for skywatchers in metropolitan areas, where high-rise buildings can dramatically reduce your field of view. It'll be even tougher to spot the full moon on June 11, when the low-riding lunar disk climbs to a maximum altitude of 20 degrees above the horizon for viewers in New York City.

Thankfully, there's no need to panic if you can't find a spot with a clear view of the southern horizon, or if clouds turn up to entirely obscure your view of the sky above. Here's how to watch the Strawberry Moon rise online via livestream on June 11, without ever leaving your house.

The Virtual Telescope Project livestream

The Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) will hold its own live stream starting at 3:30 p.m. ET (1930 GMT) on June 11, featuring views from the organization's robotic telescopes situated in Tuscany, Italy.

The VTP was founded in 2006 by astrophysicist Gianluca Masi with the goal of "bringing the universe down to Earth", according to the organization's website. It regularly hosts livestreams of major astronomical events including planetary conjunctions and meteor showers, while providing real-time views of potentially hazardous asteroids as they make a close approach to our planet.

Los Angeles Griffith Observatory livestream

The famous Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles will also host a live stream of the Strawberry Moon rising from its most southerly position on the eastern horizon in 18 years. The observatory will go live on YouTube starting at 11:42 p.m. ET on June 11 (0342 GMT on June 12).

Both live streams are completely free and require nothing but a smart device/computer and an active internet connection to watch!

Editor's Note: If you capture a picture of the Strawberry Moon and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send it along with your comments, name and shooting time/location to spacephotos@space.com.

Skywatchers were served the lowest full moon in almost two decades, thanks in part to a quirk of orbital mechanics known to astronomers as a "major lunar standstill". This phenomenon occurs over a two-year period when the moon's tilted orbit is at its greatest inclination relative to our planet's celestial equator (which is essentially Earth's normal equator projected out into space).

During a major lunar standstill, the moon can be seen rising and setting at more extreme positions on the horizon, while tracking a very high — or low — path through the night sky depending on the time of year. June's Strawberry Moon occurs close to the southern solstice for those in the southern hemisphere, which means that it's never particularly high in the sky to begin with. The major lunar standstill exacerbated this effect, making the June full moon the lowest full moon in almost two decades.

This month's full Strawberry Moon was named for the brief fruit picking season that occurs around this time each year by Algonquian, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac.

Read on to see the best pictures of the 2025 Strawberry Moon as captured by the global astrophotography community. As always, if you missed last night's full moon don't worry. The lunar disk will continue to appear (almost) fully lit for the next few nights, so be sure to read up on the best practices for observing and photographing the lunar surface as it transitions to a waning gibbous moon in the coming days.

The best photos of the June 2025 full Strawberry Moon

Space enthusiast Marwella Zhang was able to capture this detailed portrait of the Flower Moon around midnight from Bangka Island in Indonesia, while grappling with the haze caused by tropical storm Wutip.

"After sunset, the sky was starting to get clear," Zhang told Space.com in an email. "I took my first shot, but the sky was still hazy. By midnight, as it had been predicted, the sky got clear, and I took the opportunity to get a better shot of the moon."

New York's photography contingent also showed up in force to capture stunning compositions of the full moon framed by the iconic city skyline. Photographer Gary Hershorn was able to position himself to capture the orange orb of the Strawberry Moon hanging above the spire of the Empire State Building on the night of June 10.

Hershorn also used a powerful lens to snap the moment Earth's natural satellite appeared to brush up against the famous landmark, creating a colorful scene that blends the warm reflected sunlight bouncing off the lunar surface with the glow of the city beneath.

Kristin Louise Raught caught a striking view of the Strawberry Moon hanging over the ghostly form of Mt. Rainier in Washington State on June 10. "I went out to get a photo of the moon directly over Tahoma (Mt. Rainier) but I saw the ferry coming and wanted to include it in the photo," Raught told Space.com in an email.

"Rather than wait for the moon to align with the mountain, I decided to instead catch the ferry at the last possible moment before it disappeared behind the building on the pier," explained Raught. "I wanted to preserve the detail in the moon, so I opted for less light in the photo overall. I was happy that the sailboat was positioned so perfectly at this moment, it adds a wonderful detail to the photo."

Andrew von Rathonyi took a different approach when eyeing the moon from the town of Irondequoit, New York, choosing to frame the celestial body as it appeared to graze the top of a low-hanging cloud, illuminating its fringes with reflected sunlight.

One particularly striking shot was captured by Ahsan Mohammed Ahmed Ahmed in the city of Halabja, Iraq, which featured the silhouette of a man playing the violin on a hillside, framed by the rising form of the full moon.

Ismael Adnan Yaqoob was able to snap the Strawberry Moon as it rose above a ferris wheel in the Iraqi city of Duhok on the night of June 10, at which point it had moved further from the horizon, losing the orange glow of moonrise.

Photographer Isla Terli was able to snap the silhouette of a passenger airliner from Turkey as it passed across the face of the full Strawberry Moon, along with the prominent craters, ejecta rays and lunar seas that mark its surface.

Twitter/X user @VeronicaJoPo caught the Strawberry Moon traveling low over Ely Cathedral in the town of Little Downham, Cambridgeshire, in the UK around the full moon phase.

Finally, photographer Isla Terli was able to capture this atmospheric shot of the Strawberry Moon rising over the Selimiye Mosque in the Turkish city of Edirne, soon after it had emerged from below the southeastern horizon.

Remember, the Strawberry Moon will appear almost completely lit in the nights following its full moon phase, which occurred at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) in the early hours of June 11 for viewers in New York.

Editor's Note: If you capture a picture of the Strawberry Moon and want to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

What is it?

After launching on Jan. 15 from Florida's Space Coast on Hakuto-R Mission 2, ispace's Resilience lander arrived in lunar orbit on May 6. The lander then deftly shifted its path to an orbit just 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon's surface. On May 27, Resilience took this photo, with a view of Japan being blocked by the clouds on Earth's surface, according to an ispace tweet.

Where is it?

Resilience hovers over the moon in its lunar orbit, aiming for the Mare Frigoris ("Sea of Cold") on the moon's near side, as a landing site.

Why is it amazing?

With Resilience, the Japanese company ispace hoped to be one of the first to land a private spacecraft on the moon. Unfortunately, its first mission, in April 2023, ended in failure as the crashed during its touchdown attempt.

Undeterred, ispace — in collaboration with other agencies like NASA and JAXA — designed and tested Resilience as part of the Hakuto-R Mission 2 (the R stands for "reboot"). Resilience carried five payloads, including a small 11-pound (5 kilograms) rover named Tenacious, which would have been used to collect lunar samples, according to NASA.

Unfortunately, the landing for Resilience, scheduled on June 5, 2025, came to an abrupt halt when telemetry data from the lander stopped coming in right before the soft landing, leaving the world wondering what happened to Resilience. A few hours later, ispace announced that Resilience likely crashed on the moon, bringing an end to the mission.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about Resilience and ispace's other missions as the company tries to return to the moon.

Called the "Strawberry Moon," June's full moon was named by the Algonquian, after the short fruit harvesting season that coincides with its appearance each year. The full moon phase technically occurs at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) on June 11 for viewers in New York, though its disk will appear completely lit when it rises above the southeastern horizon at sunset on June 10.

The lunar disk always appears larger at moonrise thanks to the "moon illusion," a trick of the brain that makes Earth's natural satellite appear larger than it actually is when it's close to the horizon. The moon will also likely take on a yellow-orange hue, because our planet's atmosphere scatters the shorter, blue wavelengths of the sun's reflected light.

Read on to learn more about the moon's orbit and how the major lunar standstill will affect the path of the Strawberry Moon through the night sky.

What is a lunar standstill?

The sun appears to travel through Earth's sky along an imaginary line called the ecliptic, which is tilted 23.5 degrees relative to our planet's celestial equator (the plane of Earth's equator projected into space). The moon's orbital path is also tilted at around 5 degrees to the ecliptic, which is why we don't see an eclipse every time the moon passes close to the sun during its monthly new moon phase.

Our sun's gravitational influence is constantly tugging on the moon, causing its tilted orbit to swivel in an 18.6-year cycle, according to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. We are in the midst of a major lunar standstill — the two-year period of the lunar cycle when the moon's tilted orbit is at its greatest inclination relative to the celestial equator.

During this period, the moon rises and sets at more extreme positions on the horizon while riding very high or low in the sky, depending on the time of year. June's full Strawberry Moon falls close to the Northern Hemisphere's summer solstice, when the sun tracks its highest path above our heads and the lunar disk trudges a correspondingly low track through the night sky.

This year, the Strawberry Moon's seasonally low altitude will be made more extreme by the "great lunar standstill," resulting in the lowest full moon in over a decade, according to EarthSky.org. Indeed, the last time a major lunar standstill occurred was in 2006, and a similar event won't happen again until 2043.

Editor's note: If you capture a picture of the full moon and want to share your astrophotography with Space.com's passionate readers, please send the image(s), along with your name, comments and shooting location, to spacephotos@space.com.

Although now too distant to observe from Earth, the asteroid briefly came into view in May for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Using data from the telescope's Near-Infrared Camera, a team led by Andy Rivkin of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory refined predictions of where 2024 YR4 will be on Dec. 22, 2032 by nearly 20%. That revised trajectory nudged the odds of a lunar impact from 3.8% to 4.3%, according to a NASA update.

"As data comes in, it is normal for the impact probability to evolve," the statement read. Even if a collision occurs, "it would not alter the moon's orbit."

Astronomer Pawan Kumar, a former researcher at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bengaluru, agrees the moon is safe, noting a collision with the moon "won't be a cause for concern" because any moon debris blasted into space from the impact "blow up in Earth's atmosphere if any of it makes it to near-Earth space."

First detected on Dec. 27 last year, 2024 YR4 is estimated to be about 174 to 220 feet long (53 to 67 meters), or about the size of a 10-story building. The asteroid quickly grabbed headlines for having more than a 1% chance of striking Earth, the highest recorded for any large asteroid. Follow-up observations in January and February saw the impact risk climb from 1.2% to a peak of 3.1%.

The asteroid's projected trajectory at the time suggested it could cause blast damage across a wide potential impact zone, spanning the eastern Pacific, northern South America, Africa and southern Asia. If it enters Earth's atmosphere over the ocean, NASA estimated it would be unlikely to trigger significant tsunamis, but an airburst over a populated city could shatter windows and cause minor structural damage.

However, the impact risk dropped sharply as additional orbital data came in. By Feb. 19, the probability had fallen to 1.5%, and then to 0.3% the next day. On Feb. 24, NASA announced an official "all clear" on social media, reporting the impact probability had dropped to just 0.004% and that the asteroid is "expected to safely pass by Earth in 2032."

Further analysis has since allowed scientists to rule out any risk to Earth, not only in 2032 but from all future close approaches as well. Data from telescopes in Chile and Hawaii recently suggested the space rock originated in the central main belt between Mars and Jupiter and gradually shifted into a near-Earth orbit.

Since mid-April, the asteroid has been too far away and too faint to be seen from Earth. It will swing back into view in 2028, giving scientists another chance to observe the asteroid and further refine its orbit using both JWST and ground-based telescopes. In particular, scientists will aim to gather more data on its shape and composition, which are key factors in understanding both its behavior and potential impact effects.

While 2024 YR4 no longer poses any danger, it provided scientists with a rare, real-world opportunity to rehearse the full scope of planetary defense strategy, ranging from initial detection and risk analysis to public messaging. It was "an actual end-to-end exercise" for how we might respond to a potentially hazardous asteroid in the future, said Kumar.

"2024 YR4 is a tailor-made asteroid for planetary defense efforts," he said. "It has everything it takes to get our attention."

Stargazers in the U.S. will find the moon rising higher over the southeastern horizon after sunset on June 9, with Antares shining brightly around 4 degrees to the lower left of the lunar disk. For context, your little finger held at arms length accounts for roughly 1 degree in the night sky, while your index, middle and ring fingers together amount to around 5 degrees, according to NASA.

Antares is also known as the "Heart of the Scorpion" thanks to its prominent position in the zodiacal constellation Scorpius, which itself contains a number of stunning deep sky objects, such as the Messier 4 globular cluster and the closest stellar nursery to Earth — Rho Ophiuchi.

As a red supergiant, Antares boasts a diameter 700 times greater than our sun and is known to shine roughly 10,000 times brighter. It is expected to end its life in a dramatic supernova explosion when it runs out of fuel — an event that could happen anytime from tomorrow to a million years or so from now.

The lunar disk will appear to close in on Antares as the night of June 9 progresses, with the red star eventually setting above the moon's upper left shoulder as the duo slip beneath the southwestern horizon in the predawn hours of June 10.

Viewers based in a number of southern hemisphere countries, including Australia, Tasmania and Papua New Guinea, will see the moon slide directly in front of Antares, blocking its light in an event known as an '"occultation" starting at 4:47 a.m. EDT (0847 GMT), according to in-the-sky.org.

Stargazers hoping to capture the majesty of the lunar surface should check out our handy guide detailing how to photograph the moon, while those looking for a closer view of the cosmos should read our lists of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the night sky.

Editor's Note: If you happen to capture a picture of the moon and Antares and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

What is a full 'Strawberry Moon'?

A full moon occurs each month when the moon is positioned opposite the sun in Earth's sky, which allows the lunar disk to be fully lit from our perspective. June's full moon is commonly referred to as the "Strawberry Moon" in America, but the nickname isn't a reference to its color (though there's a decent chance it will take on a yellow-orange hue when near the horizon due to our atmosphere's habit of scattering certain wavelengths of light).

Rather, the evocative name is thought to have been coined by the Native American Algonquian tribes in reference to the short strawberry harvesting season that falls around this time of year, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac. Other cultures have dubbed the event the Blooming Moon, Green Corn Moon, Birth Moon and Hatching moon, to name a few.

Regardless of what you call it, one thing is certain: June's full moon is sure to put on a spectacular display when it lights up the night sky next week.

When and where will the Strawberry Moon rise?

This month's full moon phase will occur during the early hours of June 11 for viewers in New York, at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT). The exact timing of the event will vary depending on your location on Earth, so be sure to check a trusted website such as TimeandDate.com for specifics about your locale.

The lunar disk will appear fully lit to stargazers across America when it rises above the southeastern horizon at sunset on June 10, marking the best opportunity for the astrophotography community to capture the Strawberry Moon close to the horizon.

Earth's natural satellite will appear particularly large to the naked eye at moonrise thanks to the little-understood "moon illusion," a strange effect wherein the human brain convinces us that objects are larger than they actually are when in close proximity to the horizon.

Each year, June's full moon treads a predictably low path across the spring sky due to its close proximity to the summer solstice — the time of the year when the sun is at its highest. This year’s Strawberry Moon will ride exceptionally low — the lowest in decades according to stargazing site Earthsky.org — thanks in part to a phenomenon that sees the moon's tilted orbit dragged around by the sun's gravitational influence.

Editor's Note: If you snap a picture of the full 'Strawberry Moon' and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo along with comments about the shoot, your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.