Astronomer Percival Lowell believed that he was the first person to observe canals on Venus, but because of a faulty adjustment of the eyepiece on his telescope, he was in fact looking at the blood vessels in his own eye.
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When a massive power outage struck southern California in the 1990s, Los Angeles residents reportedly called 911 to express alarm about strange clouds hovering overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way for the first time.
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An international team of astronomers has spotted the farthest known gravitational lens and, as Albert Einstein predicted, it is a galaxy that deflects and intensifies the light of a much further object.
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There are more nerve cells in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way.
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Neil Armstrong, the first man to step foot on the moon, carried with him a piece of cloth and wood from the original 1903 Wright Flyer.
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On Titan, Saturn's largest moon, the atmosphere is so thick and the gravity so low that humans could fly through it by flapping "wings" attached to their arms.
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In the last 7 years, humanity has discovered 43 potentially habitable planets.
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