15th August 1977 The Wow! signal is received by the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University. The original record, preserved by...

Elizabeth Cocking continues this astronomical blog post sequence in 2021. Each month she looks back on astronomical happenings, and the...

23rd December 1672 Rhea, the second-largest moon of Saturn and the ninth-largest moon in the Solar System, is discovered by Giovanni...

NASA becomes operational (1958) ; Luna 3 photographs the far side of the Moon (1959) : the Parker solar probe approaches the Sun (2018)

7 January 1610 Galileo discovers four moons orbiting the planet Jupiter. Looking at what he thought were a group of stars, he noted the...

27th November 1783 The first reference to black holes is mentioned by John Michell, an English natural philosopher, in a paper for the...

26th September 1905 Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is published. It is the generally accepted and experimentally confirmed...

25th March 1655 Titan, Saturn’s largest moon was discovered by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. Titan is considered the most...

13 February 1633 Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating the Copernican theory, which...

Happy New Year! 24th January 1986 Voyager 2 encounters Uranus. At its closest the spacecraft came to within 81,500 kilometres of Uranus's...