The Moon is a mystery. For all its familiarity–the regularity of its phases, the fact that everywhere on Earth it looks the same–the Moon has always been an enigma, a luminous question mark rolling across the night sky.

Here’s something you don’t see every night: the far side of the Moon, photographed by one of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft.
The Moon is “tidally locked” in its orbit around the Earth, meaning its rotational and orbital periods are exactly synchronized.

With the largest solar storm since 2005 lighting up the night skies this week after a pair of solar flares sent streams of charged particles hurtling toward the earth, prophets of doom have been lighting up the Internet.

Brilliant but unmotivated, Stephen Hawking was a 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge when he first noticed something was wrong. He was falling down a lot, and dropping things. He went into the hospital for tests, and learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

In late November, NASA’s Curiosity, the world’s biggest extraterrestrial rover, began rocketing toward Mars (see photos of the launch here) in search of any hint that the red planet might have provided a home for microscopic life. The Curiosity will eventually reach Mars in August after covering 345 million miles.

With a fast-moving mixture of comedy and seriousness, an interview on The Colbert Report is something of an improvisational flying trapeze act.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy asked a lot of the U.S. space program when he declared: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” NASA hit that ambitious target with a few months to spare.

We have seen several time-lapse views of Earth from the International Space Station, but this may well be the best. Recorded from August to October, 2011, this HD footage has been smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc, and then coupled with music by Jan Jelinek.

Electronic musician John Boswell has just released the 12th installment in his “Symphony of Science” series. Onward to the Edge celebrates the adventure of space exploration and features the auto-tuned voices of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, particle physicist Brian Cox and planetary scientist Carolyn Porco.

Sean Carroll, a physics professor at Caltech, has a knack for making science publicly accessible. He writes regularly for the blog Cosmic Variance, and you have perhaps seen him on the History Channel, Science Channel, or The Colbert Report.