New Year’s Eve sky show…

Beautiful view of the Moon and Venus in the sky above Kendal tonight as the year draws to an end… Click on the image above for a full size version. Hope all of you – wherever you are – have a great New Year’s Eve and a Happy New Year!

Planets on Parade…

If the sky’s clear where you live tonight you absolutely have to go outside just after sunset and look to the south-west. If you do, this is what you’ll see… If you click on that image you’ll see, on the larger version, that a beautiful crescent Moon will be shining in the same area of [...]

Merry Christmas everyone…!

Well, here we are, Christmas Eve… Big Day tomorrow! I’m at work later today and again in the morning, so it’s very unlikely I’ll have much chance to post here again in the next couple of days, so I’d like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year… click on the [...]

Dear Santa…

I hope it’s not too late to send you this, Santa, but I’ve been a bit busy at work, and those evil, eeeeevil people who operate the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera have kept me at my computer too, drooling over their images of craters and dust avalanches and the like. I hope this letter [...]

The beauty of Mars…

… is clearly, like any other form of beauty, in the eye of the beholder, as I found out by corresponding with a fellow Mars enthusiast… As a proud and active member of unmannedspaceflight.com – one of the busiest and most respected space enthusiast forums on t’internet – I often post images there that I [...]

Keep an eye on the Sun…

.. or rather the sky around the Sun, because at this time of year – when the temperature is plummeting and the air is icy – we can sometimes see some very interesting and beautiful lighting effects “up there”… The most obvious and most impressive phenomena we can see at this time of year is [...]

A martian reading list…

If you’ve an interest in Mars there’s a pretty good chance you’ve an interest in science fiction too – the two tend to go together – and have quite a few Mars novels on your shelves. But how many? And which ones? And which books are “out there” that you haven’t read yet..? This rather [...]

Mars rocks…

… are fascinating, I think! Biased, I know, but just look at the fractures and cracks in the rock down at the lower right of this image – a colourisation I made today from three raw images returned by the Opportunity Mars rover… Click on the picture above to bring up a shiny full size [...]

Farewell Flight…

If you have an interest in spacecraft, space exploration, “space” in any form, then you absolutely have to go and look at this stunning picture… http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1244.html … and that, right there, is why I will NEVER feel the same way about the Orion capsules that I do about the space shuttle orbiters. Like comparing a [...]

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