Astronomy Tonight

On September 24th, 2014, India made space history by successfully placing its Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also known as Mangalyaan, into orbit around the Red Planet. This remarkable achievement made I...

24 Sep 20242min

On September 23, 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle, a German astronomer, made a remarkable discovery that would forever change our understanding of the solar system. Galle, working at the Berlin Observator...

23 Sep 20242min

On September 22, 1979, a remarkable event took place that would forever change our understanding of the rings around the planet Saturn. On this day, the Pioneer 11 spacecraft made history by becoming ...

22 Sep 20242min

On September 21, 2003, the Galileo spacecraft, which had been orbiting Jupiter since 1995, ended its mission in a spectacular fashion by plunging into the gas giant's atmosphere. This deliberate crash...

21 Sep 20242min

On September 20, 1970, the Soviet Union launched the Luna 16 spacecraft, which became the first robotic probe to successfully return a sample of lunar soil to Earth. This historic mission marked a sig...

20 Sep 20242min

On September 19, 1848, William Cranch Bond and his son, George Phillips Bond, made a fascinating discovery that would go down in the annals of astronomical history. While peering through the Great Ref...

19 Sep 20242min

On September 18, 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took an iconic photograph of Earth from a distance of about 7.25 million miles (11.66 million kilometers). This image, known as the "Pale Blue Dot," ...

18 Sep 20242min

On September 17, 1789, the German-born British astronomer William Herschel discovered a new moon orbiting Saturn, which he named Mimas. This discovery was particularly exciting because Mimas was the f...

17 Sep 20241min