Category: free astronomy magazine

Posted on

Free Astronomy Magazine – January-February 2026 Issue Available For Reading And Download

Above: An artistic rendering of a dust and gas disk encircling the young exoplanet CT Cha b, 625 light-years from Earth. Spectroscopic data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope suggests the disk contains the raw materials for moon formation: diacetylene, hydrogen cyanide, propyne, acetylene, ethane, carbon dioxide, and benzene. The planet appears at lower right, while its host star and surrounding circumstellar disk are visible in the background. [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Gabriele Cugno (University of Zürich, NCCR PlanetS), Sierra Grant (Carnegie Institution for Science), Joseph Olmsted (STScI), Leah Hustak (STScI)]

And a slightly delayed announcement, but at least I got to share more molecules – the most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (January-February 2026) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

Work has also been light (no pun intended) on the editorial front with the articles being in English to start. A few folks on the Bluesky side have mentioned in past posts about the benefit for those trying to learn another language to have something (a) correct and (b) highly interesting to practice with, for which having six languages now represented covers quite a bit of territory. Not that the wait for the Universal Translator is going to be all that long at this point…

Posted on

Free Astronomy Magazine – November-December 2025 Issue Available For Reading And Download

Above: The Butterfly Nebula, located about 3400 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, is one of the best-studied planetary nebulas in our galaxy. This stunning nebula was previously imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Now, Webb has captured a new view of this nebula. Text from www.esa.int. Image available at www.almaobservatory.org.

The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (November-December 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

Closing out 2025 with "The Planet Issue," including the +6,000 now-confirmed extra-solar planets and two deep dives into TRAPPIST-1 (d and e).

Somewhere in my astronomy book collection is my first-print edition of the Peterson Field Guide to Star and Planets (right), containing an actual paper clipping from the Syracuse Herald-Journal (that old) about the discovery of the first exo-planet to be somewhat confidently detected – 51 Pegasi b – back in 1995.

My, how the times have changed.

Posted on

Free Astronomy Magazine – September-October 2025 Issue Available For Reading And Download

Above: This image captures a small section of NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s view of the Virgo Cluster, offering a vivid glimpse of the variety in the cosmos. Visible are two prominent spiral galaxies, three merging galaxies, galaxy groups both near and distant, stars within our own Milky Way, and much more. Image available at rubinobservatory.org. Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (September-October 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, and now Chinese(!) at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

We spent so much time in 2019-2020 or so (with little else to do) reading about the varying brightness of Betelgeuse and that, maybe, finally, maybe, just maybe, it was *this close* to going off in our lifetime, that we neglected to think about the collateral damage it might cause to anything in close proximity (and close is certainly relative, with anything there that might know the difference within light years certainly in for stormy weather). As it happens, a long-suspected lurking neighbor, here in the form of a pre-Main Sequence star, has recently been discovered according to recent studies with NOIRLab's ‘Alopeke instrument on Gemini North.

And it also looks like a featured-but-featureless picture right out of the National Geographic Picture Atlas Of Our Universe book (the one with the primo John Berkey cover art, mine having suffered slightly at the curious hands of my space cadet kids).

And, of course, the Vera Rubin Observatory coming online and now posting images is the second most important space science story of the past few months (the state of the NASA budget being the first by page hit) and the most important space science progress since James Webb coming online. Let us hope the gap between the capabilities of modern tools and the expectations of the next generation of similar tools only grows.