The South American country is home to the Andes Mountains and the Atacama Desert, places that have some of the stillest and driest air in the world. That makes them ideal for astronomy.
Roman was one of the first female executives at NASA, its first chief of astronomy and she played an instrumental role in making the Hubble Space Telescope a reality. She died on Dec. 25.
The comet 46P/Wirtanen just made its closest approach to Earth in centuries. No word on the whereabouts of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Cupid, Donner or Blitzen (and Rudolph).
The shower will peak late Sunday night and early Monday morning, but you can also catch a good number of meteors in the middle of the night on Saturday. Find a dark spot and let your eyes adjust.
The European Space Agency has released a chart of the exact positions of many stars in the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies. But the map only shows a small fraction of what's out there.
The last and only visible such moon of 2017 will appear Dec. 3. The best time to see it is at sunset or the following morning at sunrise, when the moon is near the horizon.
A two-story tall, digital camera is taking shape in California. It will ultimately go on a telescope in Chile where it will survey the sky, looking for things that appear suddenly or change over time.