TONIGHT / TODAY / NEXT
One useful local outlook, NASA’s image of the day, and the next astronomical event worth marking.
Live guidance for your saved, rounded observing area.
Choose an approximate location once to reveal tonight’s score, best window, target, and next alert.
SET OBSERVING AREA ↗UPCOMING NIGHT
Calculating practical naked-eye planet windows.
OPEN GUIDED SKY FINDER ↗Loading the maintained astronomical event calendar.
OPEN EVENT GUIDE ↗QUICK DESTINATIONS
The most useful field tools and archive records, without opening the full directory.
Score, weather, Moon, alerts, and best window.
02 / GOObserve NowA timed, beginner-friendly field route.
03 / FINDSky FinderWhere to face and how high to look.
04 / CALENDAREventsEclipses, meteor peaks, planets, and Moon dates.
05 / IMAGERYNASA GalleryCurated images with source context and credits.
06 / LIVEISS TrackerLive position, crew, orbit, and 3D Earth view.
FIELD APP / WORKS OFFLINE
Install Neon Archive for offline Observe Now routes, Tonight data, Sky Finder guidance, and astronomical events when reception fades.
On iPhone or iPad, tap Share and choose Add to Home Screen.
OPEN OBSERVE NOW ↗Build a timed beginner route through tonight’s best practical targets.
LIVE TELEMETRYISS TRACKERCurrent position, altitude, speed, crew, and orbit estimates.
NASA DAILY FEEDPICTURE OF THE DAYToday’s selected astronomy image, description, date, and credit.
REFERENCE CATALOG20 EXOPLANETSCompare selected confirmed worlds by size, orbit, and distance.
HISTORICAL DATABASE28 LAUNCHESLandmark rockets, payloads, outcomes, dates, and launch sites.
01 / NASA IMAGERY
Open a photo for verified context, image credit, and a link to the NASA source.
02 / SPACECRAFT
Six spacecraft, what they were built to do, and what they found.
03 / HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT
Six people, the missions they flew, and roughly how far they travelled from Earth.
04 / OPEN QUESTIONS
Cases where the first explanation was incomplete, disputed, or simply wrong.
The labels describe where each case stands today. They are not probability scores, and none is presented as evidence of alien activity.
A powerful narrowband signal appeared for 72 seconds in 1977, rose and fell with the Big Ear telescope’s beam, and has never been detected again.
NASA’s IMAGE satellite went silent in 2005. An amateur astronomer unexpectedly found it transmitting again in 2018 after more than twelve years.
Sedna follows an extremely elongated orbit far beyond Neptune. The known planets cannot easily explain how it was placed there.
Contact ended in 1993 while the spacecraft’s transmitter was intentionally off, leaving investigators without telemetry from the failure itself.
KIC 8462852 produced deep, irregular dips in brightness unlike an ordinary planet transit. Later color data strongly favored fine dust.
The first known interstellar visitor followed a slightly non-gravitational path, yet telescopes saw no obvious comet-like coma or tail.
05 / QUICK REFERENCE
Short, sourced facts from NASA mission and planetary records.
Venus takes 243 Earth days to rotate once, but only 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun. It also spins backward compared with most planets.
NASA SOURCE ↗A neutron star can pack more mass than the Sun into a sphere only about 10 miles wide.
NASA SOURCE ↗Fine Martian dust scatters blue light close to the Sun at sunrise and sunset, while the daytime sky appears reddish.
NASA SOURCE ↗Deep craters near the poles stay in permanent shadow, cold enough to preserve ice despite Mercury’s closeness to the Sun.
NASA SOURCE ↗Olympus Mons is the largest volcano known in the solar system, with broad, surprisingly shallow slopes.
NASA SOURCE ↗The long-lived storm is shrinking, but it is still about 1.3 times Earth’s width.
NASA SOURCE ↗Its average density is lower than water’s—though no ocean could possibly be large enough to hold it.
NASA SOURCE ↗Its axis is tilted by about 98 degrees, giving the ice giant extreme seasons that last decades.
NASA SOURCE ↗Its atmosphere can produce winds faster than 1,200 miles per hour, despite receiving little sunlight.
NASA SOURCE ↗The Moon spins once in the same time it takes to orbit Earth, a rhythm called tidal locking.
NASA SOURCE ↗About 99.8% of the mass in our solar system belongs to the Sun.
NASA SOURCE ↗Light travels from the Sun to Earth in roughly 8 minutes and 20 seconds.
NASA SOURCE ↗Its fast orbit lets astronauts see roughly 16 sunrises and sunsets in one day.
NASA SOURCE ↗Saturn’s largest moon is the second-largest moon in the solar system and the only moon known to have a thick atmosphere.
NASA SOURCE ↗Pluto is about two-thirds the diameter of Earth’s Moon, despite once being considered the ninth planet.
NASA SOURCE ↗Valles Marineris stretches more than 2,500 miles across Mars and is far larger than Earth’s Grand Canyon.
NASA SOURCE ↗They span hundreds of thousands of miles, yet are only about 30 feet thick in many places.
NASA SOURCE ↗06 / EDITORIAL
Original, sourced explanations of orbital tracking, exoplanets, the Moon, and deep-space communications. READ THE NOTES ↗
07 / INDEPENDENT PROJECT
Neon Archive remains free to use. Optional one-time support helps cover the domain, infrastructure, research, testing, and continued development.
Contributions are handled externally through Ko-fi. Neon Archive never receives card details and does not issue charitable tax receipts.
SUPPORT NEON ARCHIVE ↗08 / COMMUNITY
Leave a short public comment about the archive.
ARCHIVE SIGNALS
A daily history note, recent transmissions, and one place to start exploring.
Jump into a mission, object, or historical record and follow its related links.
OPEN A RANDOM RECORD ↗