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"Once footage of the car and Starman started to arrive and people wondered if it could be observed from Earth, there was just one thing in my mind: to find the answer to that question and if yes, to try take a picture — better yet, a video — of it," Andreo wrote on his website, DeepSkyColors.com. To catch a view of the shiny car as it cruised off into space, Andreo packed up his telescopes and cameras, and drove to the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve in California, a semidark site just a short drive from his home in Sunnyvale. Using...

This is a special year for Mars. Already the planet is shining big and bright in the southeastern sky before dawn, and it's drawing closer to us week by week. For four weeks from mid-August through early September, Mars will be nearer to Earth, and appear bigger in a telescope, than it has since 1988. And at its very closest, it will be a hair closer than it has been in many, many years. But how many? Various different figures are being reported in different places; some are clearly wrong. Sky & Telescope sorted through the situation to find the...