Planet watchers with a clear view to the west-southwest can find Venus and Mercury tonight through next week. Venus is much brighter and easier to see and located about five degrees (three fingers ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. In this column, we'll focus on the ecliptic, the invisible "racetrack" that hosts the sun, moon ...

As Earth orbits the Sun each year, the Sun appears to cross in front of more than a dozen constellations. As observers on a nearly circular path that takes 365 days to complete, we find the Sun moves ...

We’re getting a great gift in our skies this holiday season with three bright planets — Saturn, Jupiter and Mars — decorating our evening skies. We also have some nice celestial conjunctions, or what ...

Four naked-eye planets will appear in line, showing solar system’s plane This week we can observe four of the five naked-eye planets (Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, but not Mercury) with the added ...

Of the imaginary coordinate lines that astronomers and navigators use in mapping the sky, perhaps the most important one is the ecliptic, the apparent path the sun appears to take through the sky as a ...

(This article was first published in 2016 and has been updated). The Moon’s orbit intersects Earth’s orbit around the Sun — the ecliptic — at two points called nodes. When this intersection occurs ...

OVER the course of a year, the sun traces a path in the sky. This invisible line, called the ecliptic, isn’t created by the sun moving, but instead by Earth travelling around the sun. The solar system ...