Photo credits
Every photo in the Junior Astronomer Academy is public domain or shared under a free Creative Commons license. Thank you to NASA, ESA, ESO, NSF NOIRLab, the National Park Service, and the photographers below.
A Barlow lens and an eyepiece. The Barlow doubles the eyepiece's power.
A big Schmidt-Cassegrain, a kind of compound telescope, inside an observatory dome.
A copy of the reflecting telescope Isaac Newton made in 1668.
A few of the Very Large Array's radio dishes in New Mexico.
A finderscope, a small, low-power telescope with crosshairs that rides on the main one.
A first quarter Moon. Craters look sharpest along the shadow line.
A full Moon. The dark patches are the maria.
A Globe at Night guide from NSF NOIRLab.
A homemade Dobsonian, a popular kind of reflector.
A jet of particles shooting out of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87, photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
A long-exposure photo. As Earth turns, the stars trace circles around Polaris.
A page of Galileo's notes from January 1610. At the bottom, he drew Jupiter's moons night after night.
A star diagonal. It turns the light so you can look into the eyepiece comfortably.
A student holds a phone up to the eyepiece to take a picture of Saturn.
A student looks at Saturn through a telescope at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Albireo through an 8-inch telescope. One star glows gold and the other blue.
ALMA's radio antennas on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile, about 16,400 feet above sea level.
An artist's illustration of a brown dwarf, a ball of gas too small to shine like a star.
An astronaut's bootprint in the Moon's dust, from Apollo 11.
An illustration of ESA's Euclid space telescope.
An illustration of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in space.
An illustration of NASA's Kepler space telescope, which found thousands of planets around other stars.
An illustration of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
An illustration of NASA's TESS, which searches for planets around nearby stars.
Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star, imaged by the European Southern Observatory.
Buzz Aldrin on the Moon during Apollo 11 in 1969.
Coast Guard sailors use a sextant, a tool that measures how high a star sits above the horizon.
Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy. Many people call her the mother of Hubble.
Engineers check one of Webb's mirrors in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
ESO's Extremely Large Telescope under construction in Chile in 2022.
ESO's Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal, Chile. It has four big telescopes with mirrors 8.2 meters wide.
Families look through telescopes at a Full Moon Festival hosted by Joshua Tree National Park.
FAST, a radio dish 500 meters wide in Guizhou, China. It's the largest single-dish radio telescope.
Galileo Galilei, painted by Justus Sustermans in 1636.
Galileo's drawings of the Moon from his 1610 book, The Starry Messenger.
Ganymede, the biggest moon in the solar system, photographed by NASA's Juno spacecraft.
Hans Lipperhey, the Dutch lens maker who asked for a telescope patent in 1608.
Inside the Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain's Canary Islands. Its 10.4-meter mirror is the biggest single telescope mirror for visible light.
Jupiter and its Great Red Spot, a storm wider than Earth.
Jupiter's four big moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Kids look at Moon rocks through microscopes at International Observe the Moon Night at NASA Goddard.
Mars, photographed by Hubble in 2003, when it came closer to Earth than it had in about 60,000 years.
Mizar, the double star on the right, and Alcor, on the left.
Night skies from the countryside (top) and near a city (bottom).
One of the two Keck telescopes near the top of Maunakea in Hawaiʻi. Each has a mirror 10 meters (33 feet) wide.
Orion, the Hunter. Betelgeuse glows at the top left and Rigel at the bottom right.
People in Madras, Oregon, watch the 2017 total solar eclipse through safe eclipse glasses.
Rigel shines blue-white beside the Witch Head Nebula.
Saturn photographed through a backyard telescope.
Saturn, photographed by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
The Apennine Mountains on the Moon, photographed by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility, seen from orbit.
The Big Dipper over Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.
The first picture of a black hole, at the center of the galaxy M87, taken in 2019 by radio telescopes linked around the world.
The Hubble Space Telescope, lifted out of the space shuttle Atlantis in 2009.
The James Webb Space Telescope's 18 gold-coated mirror pieces, before launch.
The Milky Way over Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.
The Orion Nebula, a star nursery, photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Pleiades, also called the Seven Sisters.
The rim of Copernicus crater, photographed by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The Sun, a yellow-white star.
The W of Cassiopeia in a dark sky.
The Yerkes Observatory refractor in Wisconsin. Its lens is 40 inches wide.
Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, wrapped in orange haze. Photo from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Two telescopes Galileo made, now at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy.
Tycho crater, about 53 miles wide, with bright rays spreading across the Moon.
Venus goes through phases like the Moon as it circles the Sun.
Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón, Chile, on a snowy day.
Visitors at Joshua Tree National Park's Full Moon Festival, lit by red lights that protect night vision.
Visitors explore the Moon at International Observe the Moon Night at NASA's Goddard Visitor Center.
Visitors watch the 2017 solar eclipse at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Webb's First Deep Field. Almost every speck of light in it is a galaxy.
NASA photos are used under NASA's media guidelines and don't mean NASA endorses The Science Haven. Photos were resized for the web.