Over the past few months, I have been in charge of selecting the weekly poll we put up on the main page of Astronomy.com , and it has given me some insight into our readers and those who visit our site. Here are five things I’ve learned so far: 1) Readers have high hopes for a jovian moon. When asked where they thought we might find extraterrestrial microbial life , voters thought we’ll have the most luck on Europa (37.5 percent of the votes). Mars...

Next week, Astronomy magazine’s latest special issue hits newsstands, and it’s one I’ve been looking forward to seeing published since I started working here almost 4 months ago. The Solar System was one of the first projects I got to work on, which by that time meant reading all the stories and checking the layouts for any minor errors. So, it was really as if I were getting a sneak peek at the final product. And by doing so, I got a glimpse of how...