Choose something below. A robotic telescope will photograph it and send the picture back with your name on it. It costs you nothing, and it always will.
Close enough that you can see individual craters, and the only other world humans have stood on. Point at the line between light and dark, where the shadows are long and everything looks three-dimensional.
Sign in to ask for thisA nursery. Thousands of stars are being born inside this cloud right now, and four of the brightest sit at its heart in a shape called the Trapezium. It is the easiest beautiful thing in the sky.
Sign in to ask for thisLook carefully, because you will not see the planet. In 2025 astronomers found a world here about four times the mass of Earth, sitting in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist. Nobody has ever seen it and no telescope on Earth can. It was found because the star wobbles as the planet pulls on it. So what you are photographing is a small red star in Gemini, and the light reaching the camera tonight left before you were born. The planet is in this picture. You just cannot see it yet.
Sign in to ask for thisThe rings are real, they are made of ice, and you can see them yourself. Almost nobody forgets the first time.
Sign in to ask for thisThe furthest thing you can see with your own eyes, and the largest galaxy near ours. The light arriving tonight left before our species existed. In about four billion years it will collide with the Milky Way.
Sign in to ask for thisSeven sisters, and a cluster young enough that the stars still trail the gas they formed from. Named and told about by almost every culture that ever looked up, on every continent.
Sign in to ask for thisA dying star that blew its outer layers off into a smoke ring. This is roughly what our Sun will do, and it is the clearest picture of our own ending that the sky offers.
Sign in to ask for thisSeveral hundred thousand stars held in a ball by their own gravity, most of them nearly as old as the universe. In 1974 we aimed a radio message at it. The reply, if there is one, is due in about 50,000 years.
Sign in to ask for thisTwo galaxies caught mid-collision, and the first place anyone recognised spiral structure. The small companion is being torn apart along the arm.
Sign in to ask for thisA vast cloud in the direction of the galactic centre, bright enough to see without a telescope from a dark place, with new stars burning cavities through the middle of it.
Sign in to ask for thisThe first planetary nebula anyone found, in 1764, and still one of the brightest. Another star part-way through dying.
Sign in to ask for thisA telescope needs a clear night, so an image can take a few days. In the meantime you can fly out to any of these in the Planetarium and see where it actually sits, or go and stand on the Moon and Mars yourself in Serenity, on ground built from real spacecraft measurements.
The time is given away for free, to education and outreach, by observatories that did not have to do that. They get their name on every picture that leaves here.
Pick any of the 136 languages below. You can change it whenever you like.