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The United States' 250th birthday is almost here, so why not take a break from the fireworks and explore four America-themed wonders hiding in the summer night sky?

Celestron NexStar 4SE

(Image credit: Amazon) The Celestron NexStar 4SE is ideal for beginners wanting quality, reliable and quick views of the night sky. For a more in-depth look at our Celestron NexStar 4SE review

Our celestial sightseeing targets run the gamut from lone stars and constellations to historic lunar landmarks and an uncannily shaped nebula — some of which will require a small telescope or a camera to truly appreciate.

If you're new to the night sky, then you may want to check out our roundup of the best stargazing smartphone apps , which will help you navigate to specific targets using augmented reality technology.

Apollo 11 landing site

One of America's finest moments came on July 20, 1969, as Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. took humanity's first steps on the surface of Earth's moon. Here's how to spot the region of the moon that contains the Apollo 11 "Tranquility Base" landing site with the naked eye on the weeks surrounding a full moon .

The Sea of Tranquillity can be found close to the terminator line seperating night from day on July 4. (Image credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio.) First, find the dark expanse of Mare Tranquilitatis darkening a swathe of the moon's eastern limb close to the equator, where ancient lava flows once filled networks of impact basins before solidifying to create vast basaltic plains.

The location of the Apollo Landing site in the Sea of Tranquillity (Image credit: Moon background NASA LRO imagery, annotated in Canva by Anthony Wood.) The Apollo 11 landing site is located on the southwestern shore of the Sea of Tranquility, between the Sabine and Moltke impact craters, which can be spotted with the aid of a small telescope. You can also search for the Apollo 11 backup landing sites using our handy guide , or even attempt to find where each Apollo-era mission touched down on the lunar surface .

Spica

The United States' relationship with the night sky dates back to its founding. After all, the stars depicted on the nation's earliest flags were intended to symbolize the birth of a new constellation, with each representing one of the 13 original colonies that formed the early union, according to the Smithsonian Institution .

Spica shines blue-white against a sea of fainter stars. (Image credit: Roberto Mura via Wikimedia Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license .) You can honor that spirit on the nation's semiquincentennial anniversary by finding a star whose light left its surface around the same time that the United States declared its independence!

The blue-white double star system Alpha Virginis — known better as Spica — is located roughly 250 light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo . As such, the light cast out from its surface some 250 years ago is only now reaching Earth, having traveled for centuries through the near vacuum of space at the speed of light — a blistering 186,282 miles per second (299,791 kilometers per second).

You can locate Spica using the stars of the Big Dipper asterism in the western sky. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva.) To find Spica, you first need to locate the seven bright stars of the Big Dipper asterism above the northwestern horizon after sunset, and trace an imaginary line along the curve of the Big Dipper's handle. Do that, and you'll come across the bright orange star Arcturus , the 4th brightest star in the night sky. Continue that arc beyond Arcturus and the next bright blue-white star you find will be Spica!

The constellation Aquila

Next up, we have the constellation Aquila, the "Eagle" , which shines along the glowing ribbon of the Milky Way in early summer. The constellation evokes the shape of a great Bald Eagle, which was adopted as a national emblem of the United States in 1782. Aquila itself has been associated with an eagle for thousands of years and was catalogued by the ancient Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.

Aquila shines above the southeastern horizon in the hours following sunset in early summer. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva.) A good way to find Aquila is to search for the bright star Altair , which can be seen glowing halfway up the southern sky to the left of the Milky Way for viewers in the U.S. around midnight in early summer. Altair, along with the nearby stars Alshain and Tarazed, represent the head of the great eagle, while the body and raised wings of the celestial bird are depicted in a cross formation of stars beneath.

North America Nebula

Our final stop is the North American Nebula — a gorgeous emission nebula whose vast glowing clouds of interstellar hydrogen resemble the outline of North America.

The North America Nebula is too faint to see with the naked eye. However, a pair of 10x50 binoculars or a small telescope should reveal the star-forming region as a gentle brightening in the band of the Milky Way from a dark sky location, less than five degrees from the bright star Deneb, which shines above the eastern horizon after sunset.

The North America Nebula as captured during the Digitized Sky Survey (right) and Hubble Space Telescope (left). (Image credit: Ground-based image: Digitized Sky Survey; Hubble image: NASA, ESA, and K. Stapelfeldt (Jet Propulsion Laboratory); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)) Its structure is best seen through long exposure photography, which will help reveal the dusty filaments and chaotic cosmic clouds that form the nebula. Read our beginner's guide to photographing the Milky Way for more!

The North America Nebula glows above waterfalls in the Isle of Skye. (Image credit: Josh Dury) Want to get a closer look at the night sky? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best telescopes and binoculars for stargazing, along with our expert tips for beginning your amateur astronomy journey .

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Exchange Inflows Spike to 49,000 BTC in a Day, Signaling More Volatility is Coming: Report

CryptoQuant’s weekly report, “Incoming Volatility?”, makes a clean, data-backed case that something is about to break.

Bitcoin exchange inflows spiked to roughly 49,000 BTC on June 30 — an extreme reading seen only four other times in 2026. Ethereum inflows blew past 1.25 million ETH the same week. Altcoin deposit transactions hit nearly 45,000 a day, the highest in two months and the exact pattern that front-ran Bitcoin’s slide from $82K in early May to below $58K in late June.

Every one of those signals has historically preceded a directional move, usually down.

And yet, as of Thursday morning, Bitcoin is trading around $61,600 — back above the $60K support the report frames as the line in the sand, and up several thousand dollars from Wednesday’s print near $58,600. The chain is screaming risk-off but the price just shrugged it off.

The most bearish detail in the report isn’t the raw inflow volume — it’s the composition. The average deposit size doubled from 1 BTC to 2 BTC. That’s not retail panic-selling in dribs and drabs; that’s whales and institutions deliberately repositioning coins onto exchanges.

As CryptoQuant’s Julio Moreno notes, a jump in average deposit size is a more bearish tell than high volume alone, because it signals intent rather than noise. When large holders queue up to sell, they usually know something, or think they do.

So why did price go the other way? Because the flows aren’t happening in a vacuum. Bitcoin’s June bleed had less to do with anything crypto-native than with capital rotating out of digital assets and into the semiconductor trade, U.S.-Iran tensions stoking inflation fears, and Strategy trimming its stack.

Mt. Gox moving 10,422 BTC last month revived creditor-selling anxiety ahead of the October repayment deadline. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, meanwhile, have bled billions across a double-digit streak of outflow sessions.

The whales moving coins to exchanges may simply be positioning for that same macro storm and not really causing it.

Thursday’s bounce came courtesy of dovish Fed commentary that eased rate-cut fears. That’s the tell within the tell: in this market, macro is the dog and on-chain flows are the tail.

Bitcoin price action

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $61,469.98, up $1,322.54 (+2.2%) on the day after bouncing off a 24-hour low of $59,520 and peaking near $62,148 around 10 a.m.

The recovery back above $60,000 — with $32.49B in daily volume and a $1.23T market cap — lines up with the report’s read that $60K is the battleground level, and today the bulls are holding it.

This post Bitcoin Exchange Inflows Spike to 49,000 BTC in a Day, Signaling More Volatility is Coming: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman .

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Astronomers have spotted an ancient galaxy shining through the cosmic fog of the early universe, revealing a detailed view that was thought to be impossible.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope , along with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers detected "ionizing" ultraviolet photons — energetic light capable of stripping electrons from hydrogen atoms — coming from the galaxy, called MXDFz4.4. It's the earliest such detection on record, arriving only around 250 million years after the end of a major cosmic transition called the Epoch of Reionization , the researchers explained in a study published June 23 in The Astrophysical Journal .

For hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang , the space between galaxies was filled with a fog of neutral hydrogen gas that blocked this kind of light. Over time, radiation from the first stars and galaxies ionized that gas, clearing the fog and letting light travel freely across the universe — a process astronomers are still working to fully understand.

"This was thought to be impossible," Ilias Goovaerts, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and first author of the new study, said to Live Science. "What’s really special about this galaxy is that it’s getting through so much of the intergalactic medium [the ionized plasma between galaxies]. It’s the furthest away so it has the most intergalactic medium to get through."

What makes MXDFz4.4 unusual is its combination of size and star-formation rate. The galaxy is roughly 100 times smaller by area than the Milky Way , yet it forms stars around 10 times faster, packing a large number of massive young stars into a compact space. According to Goovaerts, that crowding effect helps the galaxy punch clear channels through its surrounding gas, letting ionizing light escape both the galaxy and, eventually, the murky space between galaxies. The team estimates that somewhere between half and all of the galaxy's ionizing light is escaping.

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The discovery, made in October, came about somewhat by chance. While preparing an unrelated funding proposal just days before a major deadline, Goovaerts examined an existing, deep Hubble image to check whether anyone had looked for this kind of signal there before. Within a couple of hours, he had a promising signal. "It was very, very quick from us having the idea to me going, okay, there’s something here and this is exciting," Goovaerts said. "We were excited from day one, but then it took months for it to mature and to extract all the properties about the galaxy."

An illustration of the galaxy MXDFz4.4 as it appeared roughly 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, when the Era of Reionization was drawing to a close. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)) The finding relied on an unusually rich set of observations: an extremely deep Hubble image taken from 40 hours of observations; JWST imaging across many wavelengths, used to characterize the galaxy's stars and star-formation history; and one of the deepest spectra ever taken of a single patch of sky, gathered over roughly six days of observing time with the VLT's Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument. That spectrum confirmed the galaxy's distance through its Lyman-alpha emission line — which serves as a "hydrogen fingerprint," or a glow given off by excited hydrogen gas, that astronomers can use to measure cosmic distance and time.

No other galaxy from this early period had previously shown detectable ionizing light, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind so far, study co-author Marc Rafelski , deputy mission head for the Hubble Space Telescope at STScI, noted in the statement. .

Researchers say bursts of vigorous star formation like the one seen in MXDFz4.4 may have played an important role in clearing the early universe's hydrogen fog and that more galaxies like it are likely still waiting to be found.

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