At night, seven-year-old Miguel likes talking to his father Cesar Rubio about planets and stars. “I try to nurture that,” says Rubio, a machinist in Pomona, California, who makes parts for mining and ...

This is the month of the "Great Celestial Summit Meeting" between a crescent moon, three bright planets and two bright stars. The stars (Pollux and Castor) and planets (Venus, Jupiter and Mercury) ...

Astronomers are often asked how the casual observer can distinguish planets from bright stars in the night sky. It is commonly thought, and with a certain degree of justification, that stars twinkle, ...

Of the five bright naked-eye planets, the two most favorably positioned for viewing during April are in the evening sky. Dazzling Venus, low in the west-northwest for about two hours after sunset, and ...