We take a look at our natural satellite’s eerie glow. Perhaps rather bizarrely, the Moon is actually very dark, and it doesn’t glow for the reasons you might think. The ancients thought that the Moon produced its own light, but we now know definitively that this is not the case. Rather, our Moon reflects the light [...]

Even as astronomers work toward the hotly anticipated milestone discovery of an Earth-like twin orbiting another star, researchers are already asking what it will take to detect the existence of extraterrestrial life on such a planet. First, the bad news: No telescope in existence seems to have the observing power to pick out the kinds [...]

According to astronomers a recently discovered group of quasars exceeds in size anything previously believed possible, requiring a fundamental revision of cosmological theory. But perhaps the real mystery is how the scientific media failed to acknowledge that discoveries of this sort were predicted by one of the 20th century’s leading astronomers, Halton Arp. Many years [...]

Astronomers have obtained the best images ever of a star that has lost most of its material to a vampire companion. By combining the light captured by four telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory they created a virtual telescope 130 metres across with vision 50 times sharper than the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. [...]

A long filament erupted on the sun on Aug. 31, 2012. The filament of solar material had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, or corona, and erupted into space, creating a coronal mass ejection, or CME. The flare traveled at an astonishing 900 miles per second, and connected with Earth’s magnetic environment, causing aurora to appear [...]

A newly discovered comet could offer a ‘once-in-a-civilization’ viewing opportunity that is unlikely to come again in our lifetime. Currently a faint speck in the night sky, Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) was only recently discovered. But as it emerges from the haze of the distant Oort Cloud and makes a close pass around our sun [...]

Source: Laurent Laveder, photographe – Galerie Nuit http://bit.ly/GVCI3p

This is a clip from a BBC 4 special called The Satellite Story. This clip hilights the efforts by amateur astronomers to track satellites. There is a great sequence of their efforts to track the International Space Station.

Flashing space station with beams of light as it passes overhead had never been successfully done—until yesterday. It sounds deceptively easy. In an earlier post I wrote about the technical requirements. But like so many other tasks, it becomes much more involved in the execution than in the planning. Early Sunday morning, at 01:27 our time, [...]

Telescope images captured of the sun on Monday (March 12) show what appears to be a planet-size shadowy object tethered to the sun by a dark filament. In the image sequence, a burst of brightly lit material can be seen erupting from the sun’s surface surrounding the dark object, after which the orb detaches from [...]