As members of an elite band of cosmic explorers, they are among the few to have gone beyond the final frontier and looked down on the Earth from space.

Star gazers on the east coast of the North Island have had the best view of the blood moon tonight, MetService says.

Uranus - the planet with the unfortunate-sounding name - has long been the butt of jokes.

Apocalypse-mongerers are greeting a fairly rare (but foreseeable) astronomical event as the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy of global catastrophe.

Nasa has revealed that one twin will be put in a rocket and the other kept on the ground as part of a study on the effects of orbiting the Earth.

American scientists operating a $23 million telescope in Antarctica have announced the discovery of what could be described as the fingerprint of God.

Scientists have detected the enigmatic ripples in deep space that were triggered by the rapid expansion of the Universe during the earliest moments of its creation some 13.7 billion years ago.

Following the release of Oscar-winning film Gravity, NASA has released a series of photographs depicting the 'real-life Gravity'. Including photos on the International Space Station, Space Shuttle, NASA astronauts and various images of Earth captured from space.

British billionaire Richard Branson said his Virgin Galactic venture is on track to carry its first fare-paying passenger to the edge of space this year.

Scientists have finally come up with an explanation for a visual illusion that was first identified in the 16th century by Galileo Galilei.

If your body was laid bare to the alien environment of Mars, the vacuum of space would boil every fluid in it, then freeze-dry your remains.

A newly released Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image shows the nearby spiral galaxy M83 in rich detail, Also known as the Southern Pinwheel, the galaxy lies 15 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra. Bold magentas and blues indicate the galaxy blazes with star formation, and the galactic panorama depicts stellar birth and death on a vast scale of 50,000 light-years. courtesy Space.com

On the 10th of January 2014, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo completed it's third powered test flight. In command on the flight deck for the first time under rocket power was Virgin Galactic's Chief Pilot Dave Mackay.

Although the moon has remained largely unchanged during human history, our understanding of it and how it has evolved over time has evolved dramatically. Thanks to new measurements, we have new and unprecedented views of its surface, along with new insight into how it and other rocky planets in our solar system came to look the way they do.

Since the early 1990's, astronomers have known that extrasolar planets, or "exoplanets," orbit stars light-years beyond our own solar system. Although most exoplanets are too distant to be directly imaged, detailed studies have been made of their size, composition, and even atmospheric makeup - but how?

A colony of ants have set up home in the International Space Station as part of an experiment to see how their behavior changes in an environment of low gravity.

Scientists monitoring solar activity believe a mass ejection of particles from the sun could mean people in some parts of Britain and North America are treated to a rare glimpse of the Aurora Borealis over the next few hours.

World-famous astronaut Chris Hadfield says the place on earth he would most like to visit after his space odyssey is Marlborough.

The sun has fully "flipped upside down", with its north and south poles reversed to reach the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24, Nasa has said.

Observer writers look at hot topics for next year, from surveillance to missions to map out the galaxy.

Kiwis are in for an astronomical treat in April and October next year

The sun is set to “flip upside down” within weeks as its magnetic field reverses polarity in an event that will send ripple effects throughout the solar system.

Asteroids like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth could have shot life to Mars or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, US scientists have said.

NZ Science Media Centre staff and their Oz counterparts put together their 10 top picks for the world's biggest science stories of 2013.