You Never See the Sun Where It Actually Is — Only Where It Was 8 Minutes Ago
Light takes time to travel, so every glance into space is a glance into the past. The night sky shows stars as they were years, even millennia, ago.
Today’s hidden fact · Sunday, August 9, 2026
Voyager 1 is over 24 billion km away, so far its radio signal takes 22+ hours to arrive, sent by a transmitter weaker than a refrigerator bulb.
A football-field-sized lab, falling around Earth at 8 km every second.
ISS Oleg Kononenko · Nikolai Chub · Tracy Caldwell Dyson · Matthew Dominick · Michael Barratt · Jeanette Epps · Alexander Grebenkin · Butch Wilmore · Sunita Williams
Tiangong Li Guangsu · Li Cong · Ye Guangfu
2010 FX9

LDN 1295: The Giraffe Nebula
What does this image look like to you? Many see a giraffe facing right, with neck stretched high and long legs mid-stride (but some may see a squirrel instead). The featured image shows LDN 1295, also called the Giraffe Nebula, in the constellation of the …

Long March 2D/YZ-3 | Unknown Payload

Falcon 9 Block 5 | USSF-153

Falcon 9 Block 5 | O3b mPower 11-13

Starship | Flight 14

Vega-C | Sentinel-3C & FLEX

Gravity-1 | Unknown Payload

Falcon 9 Block 5 | USSF-259

Soyuz 2.1b | Progress MS-35 (96P)

Long March 12 | Unknown Payload

Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 15-27

Electron | LOXSAT 1

Falcon 9 Block 5 | Crew-13

Falcon 9 Block 5 | SDA Tranche 1 Transport Layer A

Long March 12A | Flight 2

Long March 8A | Unknown Payload
2010 FX9
465824 2010 FRwatched by NASA
2018 VG
2014 FV32
2019 GM1
2007 QE3

NASA · today
APOD: 2026 September 10 – LDN 1295: The Giraffe Nebula
APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 10 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cos…

NASA · today
Dust Storm Sweeps Over Mali

Spaceflight Now · today
Live coverage: SpaceX to launch classified payload for the U.S. Space Force

Arstechnica · today
As Europe flounders in space, a rising French star may show the way

NASASpaceflight · today
Flight 15 pairing undergo testing at Massey’s

NASA · today
NASA Adds Relativity Space’s Terran R to Launch Services Contract

NASA · today
NASA’s Chandra Unveils Mysterious X-Ray Objects
Scroll from your rooftop to the edge of the observable universe. Every stop is real.
Begin the voyage →The real solar system, computed from orbital mechanics. Scrub time and watch the maths.
Run the simulation →Five questions, one round a day, same for the whole planet. Build your streak.
Play today's round →Put Earth next to the Sun. Then next to a black hole. Watch your brain give up.
Compare anything →Black hole, light-year, quasar — every space term, explained like a human.
Learn the language →Light takes time to travel, so every glance into space is a glance into the past. The night sky shows stars as they were years, even millennia, ago.
In 2015 we caught two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, wobbling spacetime by less than the width of a proton. Einstein predicted it a century earlier.
The Carrington Event made auroras glow over the tropics and shocked telegraph operators. A repeat today could cripple power grids and satellites worldwide.