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

Monday 6th September 2021 6:30 to 8pm ​ Presented by Rick Benitez. Rick Benitez is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of...

4th February 1600 Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler meet for the first time near Prague. Kepler arrived at Tycho’s new observatory, Benatek...

Happy New Year! Elizabeth Cocking continues this astronomical blog post sequence in 2023. Each month she looks back on astronomical...

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

13th August 1898 The asteroid Eros is discovered by the German astronomer Gustav Witt at the Urania Observatory in Berlin, and...

2 June 1966 Surveyor 1, the first of the Surveyor robotic spacecraft, soft lands on the Moon. It was the first American spacecraft to...

12 April 1633 The inquisition of Galileo by the Roman Catholic church begins. He was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to...

7 March 1831 The Royal Astronomical Society receives its Royal charter from King William IV. The society was founded in 1820 as the...

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