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Sample from Curiosity's billion-pixel panorama
A Billion Pixels of Mars-scape — June 19, 2013
When you take your camera all the way to the Red Planet, no one's going to blame you for taking a lot of touristy snapshots. Put 896 of them together, and here's the result!

Ultraviolet view of Venus
The hurricane-like winds at Venus's cloudtops have steadily become faster since 2006 — and planetary scientists have no idea why it's happening.

Keck I
Studies of primitive stars suggest the universe has far too little of one form of lithium and far too much of another. But new work shows that the second problem might be nonexistent.

Cat's Paw Nebula
The Cat's Paw Nebula is home to many bright, young stars. But thousands of fainter stars concealed behind dust reveal themselves in a new infrared image.

SOFIA readied for flight
My Hour in the Stratosphere — June 16, 2013
The stars were not aligned when one of Sky & Telescope's editors signed up to ride NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.

NGC 3766
Surprise Variable Stars — June 11, 2013
Astronomers have discovered an unexpected class of variable stars in the open cluster NGC 3766. The stars are problematic for current theories of star behavior and raise perplexing questions about why the stars are variable at all.

Baby star with protoplanetary disk
Was our Sun a Feisty Toddler? — June 11, 2013
Detailed observations of a young, nearby star are giving astronomers a chance to glimpse the Sun’s active youth.

How to Toast a Planet — June 11, 2013
A new study suggests that close-in gas giants may heat up electrically like toaster coils plugged in to their host stars via the power lines of the stellar wind — explaning why the planets inflate.

Spectacular high-resolution images released at the 222nd American Astronomical Society conference in Indianapolis reveal two of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbors in a new light.

Curiosity artwork
NASA's roving geology lab has been on Mars for 10 months, and scientists are finally preparing to send the rover toward its main objective: a towering mound of layered sediments inside Gale crater.

dust trap in Ophiucus
Trapping Alien Dust — June 6, 2013
New observations with the powerful ALMA observatory reveal a huge pile-up of dust around a young star. The result could help astronomers solve a long-standing mystery in planet formation.

Curioisty's RAD instrument
Thanks to a detector carried across interplanetary space aboard NASA's Curiosity rover, researchers now have a much clearer idea of radiation exposure that future astronauts will endure when traveling to and from Mars.

SAS amateur astronomers
A recent annual meeting of amateur astronomers in Big Bear, California, proved once again that the amateur community is pursuing impressive science endeavors.

Mars Express
Mars Express celebrates a decade of orbital observations of the Red Planet.



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