NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is now just 3½ years from its historic flyby of Pluto. Mission scientists have launched a petition to have the spacecraft commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp — and they want you to sign it!

S&T associate editor Tony Flanders muses on the rewards and challenges of scripting a television program.

A tiny lab experiment could provide additional evidence for how galaxies come by their magnetic fields. The physics isn't new, but that's part of the allure.

An international committee formed to settle the protocol for civilian time once and for all recently announced an important decision — they're going to put off the decision for another three years.

It's been eight years since NASA dropped twin rovers onto the Martian surface. Spirit succumbed to the planet's harsh conditions in 2010, but Opportunity continues to amaze mission scientists with its longevity and scientific productivity.

A study of historical star catalogs has turned up a surprising result: long-gone stargazers knew that the stellar magnitudes they observed needed correcting — but the correction is for an atmospheric effect scientists didn’t quantify until the 1700s.

His company got its start with the military surplus optics that flooded the marketplace right after World War II. Ever since, Edmund Scientific (now Edmund Optics) has inspired generations of budding astronomers.

Beginning later this year, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment will begin to analyze the spectra of one million primordial galaxies — and, its designers hope, get some answers about the mysterious force that's accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Brief, variable dips in the light from a low-mass star have left astronomers wondering what strange object could be periodically blocking the starlight. Their hypothesis? A closely-orbiting planet is disintegrating before their eyes.

Newly online: light curves for 198 million stars. The latest great mass of variable-star data comes from the Catalina Sky Survey — which is actually looking for asteroids.

Sky & Telescope's March 2012 issue is now available to digital subscribers.

Last week, NASA engineers reluctantly shut down the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a largely unheralded orbiting outpost that relayed a steady stream of observations for 16 years.

Observations of a black hole that spat out twin blobs of superhot material may help astronomers understand how the mysterious beasts create powerful jets that shoot out from their poles. The blobs appeared just as the system went quiet in X-rays.

Aided by an amateur astronomer, Kepler scientists have detected an exoplanet system containing three sub-Earth-sized planets, the smallest of which is about the size of Mars.