Mercury reaches its point of greatest eastern elongation on Friday (July 4), presenting an excellent opportunity to spot the ...

The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter captured the first-ever images of the sun's south pole in March, which were ...

The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft returns first-ever data of the Sun collected from a 17-degree tilted ...

The ecliptic outlines the path that the sun, moon and planets of our solar system take as they wander our skies from night to night and from month to month.

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a joint mission between the European Space Agency and NASA, is the first to venture into a ...

That is because Earth, the other solar system planets, and all other modern spacecraft orbit the sun in a flat disc around it called the "ecliptic plane." This European Space Agency (ESA) sun-orbiting ...

We Earthlings see the sun every day of our lives—but gaining a truly new view of our star is a rare and precious thing. So ...

Read Today's Paper Wednesday, January 8. 🏆Best of the Best. TRENDING⏩ ...

The moon just doesn’t wander freely across the sky as it orbits our world every month. It closely, but not exactly, follows the ecliptic — the line in the sky ...

The ecliptic is also the reason that we on Earth sometimes observe planets appearing to approach closely to each other in the sky "while they careen around the cosmic racetrack," according to NASA.

The best time to spot Venus for stargazers in the U.S. is during the pre-dawn hours on May 31 and June 1, when the planet will appear as a bright, magnitude-4.3 morning star rising over the ...