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

The robotic Solar Orbiter spacecraft has obtained the first images ever taken of our sun's two poles as scientists seek a deeper understanding of Earth's host star, including its magnetic field, its ...

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

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

The official marker of the summer season arrives tonight. It's the summer solstice, which has been celebrated for thousands of years.

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

We call this plane the ecliptic, which is defined specifically by Earth’s orbit around our star. So, Earth’s orbit is tilted 0° from the ecliptic because it defines the ecliptic.