Last night was just fantastic. Another great display of noctilucent clouds lit up the northern sky above Kendal. The pictures I took are… well, I’ll show you those in a few minutes.

This is something exceptional, this NLC season, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, not how it’s supposed to work. We’re MEANT to spend June growling and shaking our fists at the sky in frustration as weak and wishy-washy displays of noctilucent clouds appear after midnight, promising much but delivering little. We drag our way through June until July arrives and then we get some good displays, which make all the cruddy June nights worth it. Then we go back down the hill and watch NLC activity decrease until the curtain comes down at the start of August.

But this year’s season opened with an ear-shattering fanfare, and there have already been three really good displays. This is fantastic, obviously, and we’re all now wondering just how good can it get..? Are we going to see some sky-filling displays? Can’t wait to find out…

So, anyway, last night. As I walked home from work at about ten twenty pm, I looked at the northern sky and, you know, it just looked promising. I’ve thought a few times before NLC displays that the post sunset northern sky looked odd, kind of washed with a silvery light, like there was a torch shining behind the sky. I might be totally wrong about this, I might just be using hindsight to add two and two and get ten, but I don’t know… as I walked home my NLC spidey senses were definitely tingling, and an hour later, as I headed up to the Castle, lookimg at the northern sky I was pretty sure I could see faint, tantalising hints of NLC pushing through the twilight…

Up at the castle I set up my camera and took a test shot, and this is what i saw…

Oh yes! game on!!

That was around 23.30 BST, and I stayed up there until 03.00 BST Sunday morning. Between those two times I watched the NLC rise and fall, brighten and fade, shift and shimmer. I filled my camera’s memory card. I had not one, not two but THREE camera batteries die on me, and I only managed to get to the end of the display by swapping over the batteries and coaxing the last drips of power out of them. I was very, very lucky.

Well, lucky with the batteries, I wasn’t lucky to see the display. I saw that because I put in the effort. I watched the sky, looked for hints of NLC in the glow, monitored Twitter for reports from other, more northerly and easterly observers, then headed up to a viewing location which would offer me a good view if anything actually happened. That’s not luck, that’s preparation, and it’s what you have to do if you’re going to see something special and amazing in the night sky.

After midnight I was joined up at the castle by my regular observing partner and fellow EAS member Carol Grayson, and it was great seeing the NLC in the company of someone who hadn’t seen a major display like that. I’m looking forward to seeing the photos she took. Her camera is much better and fancier than mine!

But mine’s ok, and it really did me a favour by not dying completely last night so here, then, are the best photos I took last night and into this morning. I hope you like them.

Awww, I love that… my castle, and NLC… what more could you want?

Well, how about a panorama of the castle and NLC..?

The photo above has been enhanced to bring out the colour and structure of the display…

Above: as 03.00 approached, and birds started singing, the NLC were still visible, though dimming as dawn approached. By now the NLC looked like the ghostly trail of a fireball, or a nuclear test, it was a wonderful sight.

Finally, one last panorama showing the display at around 02.00…

Very tired now, but the gritty eyes and endless yawns are a small price to pay for seeing something so beautiful, they really are.

Will another display appear tonight? My fingers are crossed..!

Bit late writing this up, I know, but been busy. There was another lovely display of noctilucent clouds – NLC for short – last week, which had skywatchers drooling over its beauty. I saw it too, but almost didn’t. I was THIS (imagine a finger and thumb almost pinching together… no, closer together than that…  a bit closer… there you go) close to missing it, because it didn’t kick off until gone 2am, and I went up to the castle at 11am and, having watched this (below) minor, “Hmmm, not bad, but nothing special…” display drifting low across the NE sky, scraping its belly across the top of the hills…

…I decided to head home, very tired and convinced nothing would appear in the north… And as I turned towards the castle, camera bag over my shoulder, tripod clutched firmly in hand, I decided to take  one last look over my shoulder, to see if there was any sign of *anything* in the north -

And there it was, the unmistakeable glow from a good NLC display just starting to push through the twilight…

It’s a glow that can’t be easily described.It doesn’t really have a colour, no real shapes can be seen within it, the sky just looks… wrong… it shines, almost like tracing paper being lit from behind by a torch. There’s nothing to see when it starts, but it tells experienced NLC watchers that Something Is About To Happen. And, seeing that glow, I headed back to my observing site, set up my camera again, and waited – and it didn’t disappoint. I shudder to think of how I would have felt the next morning if I’d gone home early, only to read delighted Tweets and Facebook posts from my fellow NLC watchers describing what a beautiful show I’d missed…!

But I didn’t – phew! – and I stayed out for another hour, enjoying a really lovely display. Not as good as some I’ve seen, but really good for this early point in the Season, and one, long, comet tail-like feature photopgraphed sooo well…

Here are a selection of images from the night of June 4/5 2013…

(NOTE: those colours have been enhanced a lot to bring out the subtle details and structures in the clouds. Occasionally NLC can be bright blue white, but this particular display wasn’t… Maybe tonight…!)

(Note: that’s also been colour enhanced and sharpened)

(NOTE: THAT one has, obviously I think, been messed about with so much in Photoshop that it sobbed and begged for mercy…! If you want to know what it actually looked like to the naked eye, here you are, next photo…)

So, yes, a great night – and as I was out so long I managed to see three, yes, THREE different space station passes! Have never managed that before!

I tried again last night, June 6/7, but saw nothing during my 23.30-01.30 observing session. Maybe tonight…

WARNING: This post contains spoilers if you haven’t got through to the end of the most recent series yet. If you still need to catch up on a few episodes but keep reading, and find out what happens, don’t moan and whine to me about having it spoiled ok? You’ve been warned…

So, all the rumours were true then. Matt Smith IS leaving Doctor Who at the end of the year, and will regenerate in the Christmas Special into a new Doctor.

< Deep sigh >

I thought I’d be more upset when this news broke – as all fans of the show knew it would, one day – like I was when David Tennant left. I thought I’d be in for A Bad Day as it sank in that Matt, MY Doctor, was going to be leaving the TARDIS… but I’m ok. No, really, I am. I’m sad, yes, very sad, because I’ll really miss watching him in the role, but I’ve been thinking for a while that it’s time for a change, that it was time for a new face to look at me from across the other side of the TARDIS console.

Not, I hasten to add, because of anything Matt himself has done, oh no no no!! He’s never been less than brilliant, one of the best actors ever to play The Doctor. He’s owned that role ever since he first popped that big, strangely-shaped head of his over the doorframe of the TARDIS at the start of “The Eleventh Hour”, dripping wet, bedraggled, and looking more like a naughty schoolboy than a travel-weary Time Lord, and by the end of that episode he OWNED the role, just put it on like a comfortable jacket and he WAS The Doctor. In the four years since then he’s made even the duffest of duff scripts (and there have been a few of those lately, which I’ll come to in a moment. Give me time, I’m just cranking up here…) enjoyable. Remember how glorious he was in “Pandorica”, how touching he was with Amy, how baffled he was by River. Remember how he strutted across the universe in “A Good an Goes To War”.

But… but…

Recently he’s been ill-served by the writers, and – and this is hard for me to say – his Doctor has become a caricature of itself. In his previous seasons the eleventh Doctor has always been silly, of course, awkward and gangly, but that was balanced with a very dark and serious side, a noble side which meant in his quiet moments you really could believe he was this amazing Time traveller who had seen, and done, truly terrible things, had guilt deep enough to drown in, and worse. But through this season he’s been reduced to a bumbling clown, lurching from one slapstick scene to the next, increasingly frantic and frenetic. Matt, ever the professional, and obviously totally loyal to the show and in love with the role, never gave less than his best, but it’s been quite hard to watch at times, I’ve felt sorry for him. Gone were the spine-tingling speeches – remember him standing on Stonehenge, arrogantly telling that huge alien space fleet hovering over him to come and have a go if they thought they were hard enough? – and gone were the truly gut-wrenching scenes of introspection and self doubt. Instead we had ever faster arm twirling, increasingly silly punchlines and ridiculous situations. When he was flipping between himself and the Cyber Controller in the Cyberman episode I thought he was going to blow up, he was so manic. It was unnecessarily manic, but he made the most of the material he was given and followed orders, as all actors have to. Matt deserves better than that. The Doctor deserves better than that. I hope the next season’s writers get their collective fingers out and write some really good stories to remind us of the brilliance the show is capable of.

I love the show, as you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, but I’m not blindly loyal, and I have to say that this last season of Doctor Who was a bit of a dog’s dinner to be honest. For a start, and fundamental to its failure I think, splitting it in two like they did was a stroke of absolute IDIOCY. Whoever had that idea needs a good kick up the arse. It meant there was no momentum, we lost track of the story arcs, and it made us care less about Clara. Because of that, in the final episode her brave and noble sacrifice meant nothing, NOTHING, because we hadn’t been able to really connect with her or her journey. Jenna Louise Coleman was brilliant throughout the season, illuminating the screen whenever she was on it, but again the writers let her down and let her down badly. She ended up just being “quirky and witty girl”, always ready with a smart one liner. Occasionaly, just occasionally, we saw some of her depth, but those moments were few and far between. After such a jaw droppingly fantastic debut in “Asylum of the Daleks” I felt Clara was criminally wasted throughout the series, which was a great shame.

But really, the writing was the main fault with this series, and at times it left me thinking what was previously unthinkable – maybe it’s time to give the show a rest again. Not for long, maybe just a year, just time for it to go away, sit on a beach somewhere, eating ice cream and enjoying the peace and quiet, you know? Because it’s looking, and feeling, tired, wrung out.

Oh, the writing was shocking in places. Not just bad, but, worse, small. Great ideas, magnificent ideas, were left unrealised. Somehow the writer of “Journey to the Centre of The Tardis” made it feel smaller on the inside than it is on the outside, that was a shocking let down of an episode. There was scope there to make the TARDIS feel like the mighty science fiction cathedral it is, but it came across as just a collection of rooms which looked like they’d been designed by a rushing Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen on a budget. Somehow, after the brilliance of “The Doctor’s Wife”,  Neil Absolute Genius Gaiman completely f****d up his Cyberman story, stripping them of all sense of malevolence and danger and turning them, lazily, into the Borg from Star Trek. Yes, they looked more modern, more streamlined, but they’re still – and this is why I’ve never liked them, ever – just big clanky silvery robot men, with no character, no real back story and no epic quality about them. And those annoying kids! What the **** was THAT about?! Where did THEY come from?! WHAT were they THERE for?!?! That was just… well… embarrassing.

There were highlights, to be fair. I loved “Hide”, really got into that one, mainly I think because the acting was just so excellent, from everyone. Ridiculous story, again, but one you could actually believe in because of the performances which were warm, and deep, and convincing. Joy ran through that episode like a mineral vein through granite. I enjoyed “Cold War” for the same reason – great actors all, giving great performances – and it was nice to see the Ice Warriors back again, despite the ridiculous, tagged-on-in-a-hurry ending. “Crimson Horror” was a typical Mark Gatiss episode, a bit of a silly story with great comic scenes and character relationships (a very welcome return for Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax, who are a fantastic team and are surely destined for a spin off series, or at least a special, one day). Again, great acting all round.

But some of the acting.. dear god… The blokes playing the salvage crew in “Journey” were so bad, so awful, my eyes hurt watching them. I hadn’t seen acting that wooden in Who since Bonnie Langford. They made K9 seem like Ian McKellen. Shocking.

So, yes, this season was disappointing, especially after the brilliance of last season, which was masterful in places and never less than hugely enjoyable. After the Christmas Special, which introduced Clara properly, my hopes were so high I could stand on them to change a lightbulb. But oh dear… such a disappointment.

And now Matt is leaving, and although I’m very sad about that I’m not Tennant-sad. When David Tennant announced he was leaving I thought “No! There’s so much more you can do!” But I don’t think there’s much more Matt can do with the show as it is now. It’s become a bit too smug, a bit too self-worshipping. It’s okay – and lovely – to have the occasional nod to the old series, to fill in a gap in the legend, we like that, it connects us to the past, but they over did it this series, it was as if they were desperate to please the old fans they forgot to try and impress new ones.

I think one big problem was that the 50th Anniversary was looming on the horizon, and this series was always only ever going to be the warm up act for that, no matter what they did. So maybe that’s why this season’s stories felt like the filler tracks on an album. It was as if they just wanted to get this series out of the way so they could do a brilliant 50th Anniversary special to really do the Time Lord and his story justice.

The last episode, “The Name Of The Doctor”, brought the series back from the brink of banality with some truly inspired moments, despite having a plot with Time travel wibbly wobbly holes in it so big you could push a small moon through them, and that gives me hope for The Special. Yeah, they’ll get that right.

But after that? After Matt regenerates into someone else? They’ve got some serious work to do in the writing room, some *serious* work, if they’re to breath some much needed life into the show.

I’m not going to end this post by saying thank you or goodbye to Matt, not yet, because it’s not time for that yet. He’s still The Doctor – MY Doctor – until Christmas Day, when he will go out – literally, I expect – in a blaze of regenerating glory, shattering windows and breaking hearts across the world. ( And for the first time in years I’ll actually be able to watch the Christmas Day episode live, because I’m at work in the morning and not the evening, so that works out rather well for once!) Until then, here we are again, we’re now in wild “Who will be the next Doctor?!?!” speculation mode.

At the moment I honestly don’t care. It will be who it will be. My bet would be another relative unknown, like Matt was when he put on his bow tie, because anyone big, anyone famous, will not be willing to commit so much time to one role, and will already be booked up with work and filming commitments anyway. I hope they find someone brilliant, someone fantastic, because Matt’s shoes – ok, scuffed boots – will be very hard to fill. But, so were David Tennant’s, and Matt filled them just fine, so the next guy will too, I’ve no doubt about that.

But they really, really, really need to give The Next Guy better stories than Matt had as he was hurtling towards Trenzalore. The fans deserve better, but, more importantly, the Doctor deserves better.

Well, I wasn’t expecting that! Every year amateur astronomers – not all of us, have to be honest – turn into insomniacs and start to live the lives of vampires, as we stay up until oh my god o’clock hoping to catch a display of NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS. If you look up at the top of this page you’ll see a tab with “NLC” on it. Click that to be taken to  a complete guide to NLC. Basically, they are very, very high altitude clouds that catch the sunlight long after we’re in darkness down here on the ground.When all the other “normal” clouds we see in the sky have gone dark, NLC appear, shining a beautiful blue white. They look like a strange kind of sci fi special effect, a force field or energy field or something like that. Something painted or sprayed on the sky.  They only appear during summer,from very late May to the end of July, and then not every night, and most displays are quite modest affairs. Occasionally a display really goes nuts, and then the northern sky blazes with beautiful silvery and electric blue cloud. This usually happens late in the “season” tho. And until the middle of June we have to make do with quiet displays of a few lines and billows…

But on Thursday night the northern sky went crazy with NLC, and up at Kendal Castle I saw, and photographed, one of the best NLC displays for years… Here are some of the pictures I took…

Look at that…! That’s just nuts! We don’t usually see anything like that until the middle of June!

Now, I’ve really enhanced and messed about with that last image to bring out the detail in the background sky. That level of detail wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but it was hinted at through binocs, and boosting the contrast of and sharpening that image has really brought out how the northern sky was saturated with NLC. What a night!

I watched that display from between 11.45 pm and about 01.30 the next morning, and I’m very pleased with those pictures. Tried again last night – lovely clear sky in the north – but nothing, absolutely nothing. Oh well, maybe tonight? The forecst is good…

Finally, the panorama you saw at the top of this post, but enhanced and sharpened and tweaked until it sobbed and begged for mercy, just to show the true extent of Thursday night’s display…

But at least I saw it! Many people didn’t because their weather was even worse than mine, so no complaints, and I managed to get a few photos too, so no complaints at all!

So, I hiked up the hill to the castle just after nine, with my rucksack full of cameras, tripods, binocs and more, and I was all ready for a good, quiet night’s planet viewing, and photography – only to have the usually blissful silence of the hilltop ruined by a group of yobs who were clambering all over the castle ruins, smashing at the rocks and stones and banging on the metal framework. As soon as they saw me they started hurling abuse at me too, which I was less bothered about to be honest than the damage I worried they were doing to the castle, which I’m very fond of as you’ll know if you’re a regular reader. I took this for so long, then phoned in my concerns to the police. I have to say the operator seemed less than concerned, but she did eventually take my number, and told me she’d arrange for someone to be there “soon”.

Eventually the castle cretins got tired of smashing up rocks, and grew bored of hurling abuse at me, and left, heading back down into town still shouting and howling like demented whatevers. When I left the castle an hour later – planets viewed, photos taken – no-one from the police had shown up. Looks like possible criminal damage to a historic monument isn’t that big a deal. That’s a great shame.

Anyway… back to the planets! Here are some of the photos I took…

That pic shows the planetary triangle clearly. That’s Jupiter on the left, Venus on the right, Mercury at the top. Another view, enhanced to bring out the planets’ brightnesses…

And finally, a view of the planets as cloud devoured them from beyond the horizon. I was able to follow them for about a minute more after this photo was taken, but that was it…

You might have to click on the image to enlarge it if you want to see the planets clearly.

…and that might be It. Tonight the weather here in Cumbria is rubbish – the sky is totally overcast, and I’ve about as much chance of seeing the planets tonight as I have of walking on Mars at the weekend. But at least I managed to see the Great Spring Triangle last night.

If you notice a strange triangle of lights shining low in the sunset sky like that this evening – not blinking, not flashing, just hanging there – don’t panic! It’s not an alien spaceship, we’re not being invaded. Those lights are actually planets.

At the moment, the planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury are all gathered together in the twilight sky after sunset. They’ve been moving together slowly for a while, and tonight is the night they make their “closest approach” and will appear to form a perfect triangle after dark. Astronomers have been looking forward to this for ages, so we’re all hoping for clear skies!

To see this rare “triple planetary conjunction” (not due to happen again until October 2015) you’ll need to be somewhere with a low and flat north western horizon, i.e no hills, trees or buildings to block your view. You’ll also need clear sky right down to the horizon.

Start looking to the NW at around 9.45pm (in the UK) and you’ll soon notice a lone, silvery “star” shining in the twilight. That’s Venus! Having found that, wait for it to get a little darker, and then you’ll spot Mercury – fainter – shining above Venus, and Jupiter (brighter than Mercury but fainter than Venus) shining to their left, the three worlds forming a perfect triangle. You’ll see this with your naked eye, no telescope needed, but if you have binoculars use them, they’ll make the planets stand out more clearly. By 10.40 or so the planets will have set.

Tomorrow night the triangle will have “broken up” and the planets will have spread apart a little, so really you should try your best to see this tonight.

Amazingly, the Cumbrian clouds parted long enough last night to enable me to see and photograph the three planets “on approach” as it were. I went up toKendal Castle to try and get some photos, and I’m very pleased with how they turned out…

As I write this the sky outside my window is beautifully clear and shocking blue, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to see and photograph the Triangle tonight. That will be really beautiful I think… Let you know tomorrow!

By 8.15pm, with quarter of an hour remaining until the Moon – already in eclipse – rose, this was our view…

…and that looked promising! Hints of clear sky on the horizon, through which, we hoped, the Moon would peek…

But it wasn’t to be. At the maximum of the eclipse, around 9.10pm, this was our view…

…so no, we didn’t see the eclipse. Instead we tortured ourselves with looking other people’s pictures of it on our phones, trawling Twitter and Facebook for images taken by people in other parts of the country and other parts of the world. And from what we saw last night, and from what I’ve seen this morning, it actually looks like the eclipse was quite impressive after all. If we’d had a clear sky we’d have seen something quite lovely, I think…

Oh well, I’m telling myself that every “thing” we miss “Up there” for the next few months is a Credit Slip we can cash in for a beautifully clear night when Comet ISON is in the sky later in the year. That’s how it works, right? Right?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave or at the bottom of the ocean this past week, you’ll have heard the Big News – that the most Earthlike worlds yet have been found by the incredible Kepler planet-hunting telescope. These two “Super Earths” are orbiting a very, very faraway star, so there’s no prospect of anyone setting off to see them in person for quite a while, but one day, one day…

As I listened to the announcement, streamed live on NASA TV, one of my first thoughts – after the intial “yaaay!” – was “For the love of god will someone PLEASE give these planets propper NAMES!!!”, because their current names, “Kepler 62e” and “Kepler 62f” just seem hopelessly, woefully, despairingly insufficient and yes, pathetic. They need names. Proper names.

Why? Isn’t in enough that they’ve been found? Isn’t that triumph enough?

Well, no, I don’t think so, I really don’t. Because if these really are worlds then we’re going to be talking, Tweeting, blogging and writing about them for a long time – certainly decades, probably centuries and very possibly millennia – so just referring to them as combinations of letters and numbers is ridiculous, frankly. What a waste of time. What a shortsighted approach.

But I think there’s an even more important reason for giving these – and other significant exoplanets already discovered – proper names. The public – who, it’s often and very conveniently forgotten – actually PAY for these incredible discoveries, through their taxes – simply won’t accept them, connect with them or identify with the significance of their discovery, until they’re given names.

Names make places seem real. They build a bridge between them and us. And this is especially true for places and objects out in space, and for the machines which we send out to explore space. I do a lot of Outreach work in the community, spending a lot of what I laughingly call my “free time” standing in front of crowds in drafty church halls, in school classrooms, in community centres and the like, “spreading the word” about astronomy, space exploration and science, and I can tell you for a fact – a FACT – that people need things to have names if they’re to acceopt and identify with them. While science types are comfortable with acronyms, and abbreviations, and bizarre combinations of numbers and letters, people “out there” are not. That’s just rubbish to them, gobbledygook, boffin-speak, yet more proof that aloof “scientists” don’t live in the real world and have no time or consideration for those who do. Introducing a picture as “A Hubble image of part of M17″ will reward me with blank looks and rapidly glazing-over eyes. Introducing the same picture as “We call these ‘The Pillars of Creation’…” triggers a much more positive response.

That’s why  it is my firm belief that until we start giving these incredible exoplanets names they will just remain abstract concepts for most people, something for “the experts” to get excited about and no-one else. They will remain “So what?” worlds for most people, not real worlds.

So, we need to start giving exoplanets names, and we really, really need to give these two new “Super Earths” names in particular. I mean, come on, it’s not as if we’re short of names we could use is it? OK, a lot of the really cool ones – the ones from Greek mythology, legends etc – have been taken already, but there must be thousands left to choose from. Many people are suggesting we name these strange, new worlds after famous planets from science fiction, but I don’t agree with that. The natures, appearances and characters of those planets are fixed so firmly in our minds – we know that “Arrakis” is a hot, desert planet, and that “Trantor” is a planet covered by a single, sprawling city, for example – that naming just any old planet after them would be ridiculous, and inappropriate. And besides, their creators often gave them such specific locations that their names wouldn’t be accurate in terms of stellar cartography anyway.

So, what do we call them then?

Well, what about character names from literature, especially fantasy literature? Personally I’d love to see some of these new worlds given the names of characters from Tolkien’s books, because they’re just incredibly beautiful, poetic and romantic. They just seem right for planets.

Oh, how I’d love to be able to take people outside into the night after one of my Outreach talks, point them towards the area of sky between Deneb and Vega – wherein lurks the Kepler search field – and tell them “Look, up there, between those two stars… out there, in deep space, we have found hundreds of planets orbiting faraway stars, some like Earth… and one of them is called ‘Galadriel‘…” Doesn’t that sound so much better than bloody “Kepler 62f”?

No, enough of boring numbers and letters! These new worlds need names, it’s slap across the face obvious they do. We name things we find – mountains, rivers, etc – it’s just what we do. It’s time we started naming exo-planets too.

I’m not the only one who thinks this, not by a long way. Many other popular and influential bloggers, writers and commentators are thinking, and saying, the same thing. There’s even an online company encouraging people to suggest and submit names for the planet found orbiting Alpha Centauri, for a small fee. It’s a controversial idea, and has many critics, some of them very vocal. Some object to the cost involved, insisting that no-one should have to pay to simply suggest a name, and there’s some justification for these objections, although others note that much of the money raised by this is going towards Outreach and Education projects, and not into anyone’s pockets.

The other concern people seem to have is that public contests like this will inevitably result in planets being given just stupid names. I understand this concern and actually share it; it’s one of the facts of 21st century life that if you give the online community an opportunity to name something – a polar bear cub, a bridge, whatever – some prats and plonkers will submit ridiculous and inappropriate, even offensive, names. Countless “Britney”s and “Spongebob”s are, right now, scattered across the solar system, their names having been added to lists gathered by space agencies for plaques and discs mounted on spaceprobes. And a quick search of the website just now revealed that the following names have all been suggested…

“Neighbourhood of Make Believe” (guessing that’s a suburb of Bucks Fizz’s “Land of Make Believe”?); “Margaret Thatcher” (better have an iron core… sorry…); “The Doctor” (what’s so daft about that? ); “Alderaan“; “Ron Paul” (see? see?!); “Fraggle Rock” (oh, I wish!) and “Mr Squeaky Pants” (an outside bet there, I think). Predictably the names of all the characters from TV’s hugely popular “Big Bang Theory” comedy series have been submitted, and there are Star Trek and Star Wars names a plenty too.  There are some great names tho. I love the idea of worlds being called “Voltaire” or “Iliana”. Sadly there’s no ‘Stuart’ or ‘Atkinson’ on the submitted list, and amazingly no ‘Galadriel’ either. I might have to change that!

But no-one should feel upset by the names on the uwingu list, it’s just a bit of fun; no-one in their right mind is actually going to call a planet “Mr Squeaky Pants“, let’s get real.  I’m pretty sure that if a company or body is smart enough to set up a way for people to submit exoplanet names, they’ll be smart enough to remove all the stoopid suggestions before drawing up a shortlist..!

But that said, maybe something as important as naming a world shouldn’t be handled by someone charging money for it, however good their reasons.

So, who SHOULD name these strange new worlds then?

To be honest, that’s got me rather stumped, I’ll admit. As you can see from that list above, there are risks with simply asking The Public to submit names, as there are with asking commercial companies to do it. One group currently insisting that it’s their job to do it – while totally failing TO do it, of course – is the IAU, the International Astronomical Union, that mysterious group of professional astronomers that decides the official names of craters, moons, valleys and mountains Out There in the solar system.

I’m sorry, I know it’s grossly unfair of me, and I’m sure they’re in reality a well-meaning, committed group, but after the whole “Pluto naming” thing a few years back, which threeatened to descend into farce for a while and caused a lot of ill feeling, whenever I think of the IAU now an image pops into my head of those Skeksis creatures from the brilliant film “Dark Crystal”, meeting in a dusty, musty old laboratory temple somewhere underground, with hieroglyphics etched into the walls and ceiling, as they debate and discuss and vote on cosmic matters, I just can’t help it…!

Naming exo-planets won’t be easy. There was a bit of a cyber-kerfuffle recently, when a “heated debate”, shall we call it, broke out between two groups of people fascinated by and passionate about this whole planet-naming thing. It ended up, basically, with the IAU shouting down from the top of their castle tower, like the French knights in “Holy Grail”, that they and only they had the right to name celestial bodies and places and everyone else should get orff their land. The thing is, I don’t remember ever voting to give the IAU that exclusive right to name things, did you? My ballot paper might have got lost in the mail, I suppose, but I don’t think so…

Besides, there are countless objects and places “Out There” which have names NOT given by the IAU. Lunar features were named by Apollo cartographers and astronauts, before and after the landings, and there are now thousands of rocks, ledges, outcrops and craters on Mars bearing unofficial names given to them by the people involved in the various rover missions. I suppose it’s possible that one day the IAU will decide to give them different names, but I really can’t see it happening, and if they tried there would be such an outcry it would make the revolution in Les Miserables seem like a mild quarrel. They’d probably write a musical about it.

No, the only solution I can come up with – sat here at my desk on a Sunday afternoon, with a bored and impatient cat sat on my knee demanding food and stroking, in that order – is for the planets’ actual discoverers to have the responsibility for naming them, in whatever way they see fit, either by naming them themselves or by organising some kind of input from the public and the scientific community. After all, if they were smart enough to find the planets, I’m sure we can trust them to find good names for them. There’s precedent for this, of course. People who discover asteroids and comets can name them. So, while I admit this suggested solution isn’t perfect, I think it would be infiniteky preferable to having the IAU sitting in judgement over everyone and everything, like “Q” from Star Trek.

A good friend of mine – who shall remain nameless, but he’ll know it’s him I’m talking about! – wondered in an online Twitter exchange recently if those of us keen to start naming exoplanets were going to give names to ALL of them, all the trillions of them that we now think are out there. It’s a good point – where do you stop? Don’t you have to be fair, and name all of them once you’ve named a few? – but I really don’t think it’s needed. I think we just need to name a dozen or so at first, the exceptional ones, the fascinating, intriguing ones that exoplanet scientists and Outreachers can use to excite and inspire people, and just see how it goes after that. I wouldn’t want to start naming the hordes of bloated, fat, swollen “Super Jupiters” or “Hot Jupiters” we keep finding hurtling around stars just at the eges of their atmospheres. Not just because I personally have a hard time accepting they’re real planets – they’re just too weird, their behaviour too bizarre, their years too short – but because there’s now so damned many of them it’s impractical. No. Select the most genuinely Earth-like, the most intriguing, the most fascinating, and name them, appropriately and carefully, and see if the practice is accepted, then move on from there.

But the basic question is, I suppose, do these planets actually NEED names? Aren’t their scientific designations enough? After all, we can’t go there, they’re too far away. We can’t even SEE them directly, we can just tell they’re there because they cause mini eclipses as they drift in front of their parent stars. So what’s the point?

Well, the point is that giving something a name makes it real, gives it character and identity. And, more fundamentally, we as a species have a need to give things names so we can identify WITH them, *accept* them, become involved *with* them.

You don’t agree? Ok then. Let me ask you something? Do you recognise the names of the following spacecraft…

OV 099… MER-2… LM-5… ?

No? Don’t feel too bad, not many people reading this will have known them either.  But each of those spacecraft made history, and will be remembered, and beloved, and honoured, for as long as there are human beings alive to recount the history of spaceflight.

OV 099 = space shuttle orbiter “Challenger”

MER-2 – Mars Exploration Rover “Spirit”

LM-5 = Apollo 11 lunar module “Eagle”

Now, if names aren’t important, why were those spacecraft given those names? Why are ANY spacecraft given names? Why weren’t we content to just keep their names as combinations of letters and numbers? Because then they would just have been machines, collections of nuts and bolts, glass and metal, rubber and plastic. Because giving them names was essential to allow the public to identify with them, to give them an identity, to link them to history.

You want more proof? Read the following list outloud…

OV 101, OV 102, OV 103, OV 099, OV 104, OV 105…

What did you feel as you read out that list? Nothing, I’ll bet. Just letters and numbers. Now read this list outloud…

Enterprise… Columbia… Discovery… Challenger… Atlantis… Endeavour…

I bet you felt something then. I bet every name sent a tsunami of memories and emotions sweeping towards, over and past you as you read out those space shuttle names. The shuttles were, essentially, technically identical, winged spacecraft with windows, wheels and wings all in the same places, but somehow each had its own personality, didn’t it? And when we say their names today, long after the last shuttle thundered into the sky, we feel something inside us stir.

Some other names to read outloud…

Voyager… Galileo… Sojourner… Spirit… Opportunity… Curiosity…

Again, memories, emotions, all associated with those names.

You see? Names are important. Names are bonds. Names are our way of investing in something. If we hadn’t been able to call them by their names, if we’d just been able to refer to them by their “factory numbers”, would we have been so mesmerised and so caught up in the incredible adventures of Spirit and Opportunity as they roved across Mars? If it hadn’t been given a real name, would Voyager 2′s solar system-crossing journey have been so celebrated? Would we still be so fascinated by it, so desperate to hear if it has finally began to travel into and through interstellar space? If names aren’t important, why was MESSENGER called MESSENGER? Why was DAWN christened DAWN? Why is a NEW HORIZONS now hurtling towards Pluto?

Interestingly, spacecraft which haven‘t been given names have slipped into history without anyone noticing or caring. The Salyuut space stations were fantastic feats of engineering for their time, real breakthroughs in technology, but they were just given numbers, so remain anonymous to the general public this day. But say the name “MIR” and you feel something, even though you are drawn into its history, you feel a part of its mission, its successes and failures.

And then there’s the International Space Station. It doesn’t have a name, it’s just known as “The International Space Station” or “ISS” for short. Originally it was going to have a name, it was going to be called “Space Station FREEDOM”, as cheesy and cliched as a 70s disco song, I know, but in hindsight it would have been better to give it a proper name, I think, because so many people I have shown it to, or talked about it to during my Outreach work, have been disappointed to learn it hasn’t got a proper name. Some have even said “That’s boring”, and while I understand the political reasons for just going with “International Space Station” I can see how giving it a proper, full name would have made it more interesting to people.

But back to naming exo-planets.

I understand why some people think that this is all a bit of a distraction, why they think there’s no need to give real names to these distant worlds, but I diagree. I think that with so many exo-planets having been discovered, with some of them even looking like genuine possibilities for deserving to be thought of as even a little “Earth-like”, now is the time to start giving some of them names. Again, not all of them, just the most special ones. We can’t go on just calling them names and numbers, it’s ridiculous. Real planets deserve proper names, I don’t know how anyone can argue against that.

The question isn’t why should we give them names anymore, it’s what should those names be? And clearly we have to find a safe, sensible and appropriate way of naming them. That will be hard work contrversial and maybe divisive too, but worth it in the end. Because right now, as there have been for generations, there are kids in school classrooms, patiently learning the names of the planets of our solar system – and they could be learning the names of planets in other solar systems too…

What an incredible thing! What an amazing time to be alive! We now know, for the first time, that ours isn’t the only solar system, we know that other stars, many of them, are circled by planets of their own. Just think about that. Ours is the first generation in the whole of human history that can go stand outside on a clear night, look up at the starry sky and know, for a fact, without doubt, that there are other solar systems out there waiting to be reached, explored and, one day, settled by our descendants. The children sitting in those classrooms, all around the world, are the ancestors of the star-crossing men and women who will look into the starry sky of “Kepler 62f” one far future night and see Sol shining there as a mere spark of light, with thousands more all around it.

They should be able to call it by its name now, to connect them with that future.

So come on, astronomical community, let’s stop faffing about, let’s get our heads together, as our hearts are telling us to,  and do the right and obvious thing for once. Let’s honour the past, celebrate the present and build a shining bridge to the future, by giving the incredible Kepler Worlds their own names.

It’s time.

Although astronomers and non-astronomers alike all now acknowledge that the Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionised astronomy, and enriched many aspects of our lives with its spectacular science and beautiful images, it didn’t start well. When the first images beamed back from the orbiting observatory appeared on monitors, the scientists viewing them, who had been looking forward to letting out great whoops of joy, could only let out heavy sighs of despair. The images were blurred. They were no better than pictures taken by ground-based instruments – in fact, they looked worse, as if taken through a camera with grease smeared over the front of its lens. They were soft focus snaps of the universe instead of High Definition museum quality portraits. It must have been heartbreaking for the telescope’s team to hear it described as “One giant squint for Mankind”…

Fast forward many years to the present, and “Hubble” is no longer shorthand for technical failure and managerial cock-up. For what seems like a lifetime it has been sending back unbelievably beautiful images of stars, nebulae and galaxies, many of which are so lovely, so head-shakingly stunning they could indeed be hung on the wall of an art gallery -

Actually, it hasn’t. Sent back those stunning images, I mean. The images we see in our magazines and books, on websites, everywhere, are not the images the telescope sends back. They’re the ‘creations’ of men and women on the ground, data alchemists who take the telescope’s raw images and turn them into something… magical.

That’s not to say they’re fake, not at all. Every Hubble image you see in SKY & TELESCOPE, or on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog or on Nancy Atkinson’s Universe Today website is a real portrait of the universe. They just didn’t start out, or come back from space, that way.

The story of how how Hubble’s raw data is turned into the stunning images we see so often today is told by Elizabeth A Kessler in her new book “Picturing The Cosmos – Hubble Space Telescope Images and The Astronomical Sublime”. How the images are taken, how they’re sent back to Earth, and how they’re processed is all described in fascinating detail by an author who is genuinely fascinated by both the process itself and the people involved in it.

But that’s only part of the book. “Picturing The Cosmos” also looks at how Hubble images are more than just scientific datasets, graphical representations of distant astronomical objects. Kessler explains how they are in the same grand tradition as the famous and gorgeous paintings by artists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt and the photographs of Ansell Adams – portraits of exotic, alien places that seem too beautiful, too dramatic to possibly be real, but really are.

When I was offered this book for review I thought it sounded very interesting, and its theme very familiar, because I’ve been saying for years and years, in my Outreach talks, that Hubble’s images are not just pretty space pictures, and give us much more than mere information about the swirling gas clouds, sparkling star clusters and catherine wheel galaxies they show so well. I’ve been insisting for years what Kessler asserts in her book – that Hubble images are works of art in their own right, and as such can and do inspire and move us in ways no other scientific images possibly can. It was delightful  (and a relief!) to learn that I’m not the only person who thinks and feels that way!

When explaining the technicalities of taking and processing Hubble images, and the background to the telescope’s construction, this book is pretty straightforward and factual. But it also provides fascinating insights into what goes on “behind the scenes” with Hubble. It was eye-opening to read, for example, how some astronomers were initially dismissive of Hubble’s images, sneering at them as just “pretty pictures”, until the world went nuts over the now famous “Pillars of Creation”image and then were suddenly converted. Funny that.

One of my favourite sections of the book, “Translating Data“, follows the “creation” of a Hubble image, from raw data being taken to its eventual publication and distribution online. As an amateur image creator myself – if you read any of my blogs you’ll already know that I love taking the raw images sent back by the Mars rovers and turning them into coloured landscapes, mosaics or 3D anaglyphs using image processing software like Photoshop and Stereophoto Maker – it was fascinating to follow  the process, and gave me a new appreciation for the image processing teams who turn the telescope’s black and white, contrasty ‘snapshots’ into the glorious pictures we all enjoy so much.

Away from the technical side of things, this is a very deep and thoughtful book, considering the symbolism and cultural significance of Hubble’s images, and I definitely loved those chapters the most. It was an absolute joy reading Kessler’s thoughts connecting Hubble to Bierstadt, Moran and Adams, connections I’ve made before. Kessler embraces the idea of Hubble’s photographic subjects being portraits of romantic landscapes and exciting frontiers, not just simple clumps of gas, scatterings of stars or lumps of rock.

This is definitely not a “popular science” book that you can dip in to when you’ve got a few minutes to spare. Nor is it yet another book of Hubble photographs, although obviously it contains some. If you want one of those, then go down to your local discount bookshop (or bookstore, hi again, US readers!) and you’ll find several of those there, leaning against a wall, the size of a paving stone and just as heavy. No. This is a detailed description of the technical challenges and triumphs of Hubble (there’s a fascinating section dealing with what ‘false colour’ means and why it is so useful to astronomers), and a thoughtful examination of what the telescope’s beautiful images actually mean on a much deeper level.

“Picturing The Cosmos” pulls off that ever so tricky trick of combining cold, hard technical explanations and descriptions with a thoughtful, emotional examination of the aesthetic appeal and cultural significance of astronomy. I have no other books anything like it standing on my sagging bookshelves over there, and I can definitely recommend it to any science-savvy reader who wants to know how hard data becomes “pretty pictures”, and to anyone who has ever looked at a Hubble photo and simply thought “That’s beautiful…”.

“PICTURING THE COSMOS – Hubble Space Telescope Images and The Astronomical Sublime”

Elizabeth A Kessler

University of Minnesota Press

ISBN 978-0-8166-7957-7

There are essentially two types of “popular astronomy” books. The first type is written very matter-of-factly, quite dryly, no thrills or frills, by an astronomer who knows their subject inside out but maybe hasn’t got much experience of actually talking to non-astronomers about it. They’re essentially “A Beginners Guide to Astronomy” Powerpoint presentations shrunk and printed on paper. Those books are essential, of course, because we absolutely need such reference books to consult at “I just need the facts” moments. Reading them is like sitting in a cavernous lecture hall, in an uncomfortable chair, listening to a knowledgeable but rather cold lecturer talk about the universe, each slide they show crammed full of text, which they then proceed to read out, word for word…

The other type of book is more relaxed, more informal, and takes you on a personal journey of discovery. Reading this type of book is more like listening to a lecture in a small, cosy venue, given by an expert who is supremely comfortable with talking to people about their subject, who is still as fired up about it as they were when they first fell in love with it, if not more so, and whose presentation is crammed full of astronomical information but is presented in a funny and entertaining way which draws you in and refuses to let you go. During such a presentation that famous, cliched lightbulb pings on above your head again and again and again, as you suddenly “get” why this happens, or why that happens.

This is one of those books, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This book is basically a masterclass in astronomy outreach and education. Its as if the authors got together somewhere and decided to put down on paper The Best Astronomy Outreach Presentation Ever, to show everyone else how to do it. Which might actually have been the case, because the back cover proudly states that the two authors – Kimberley K Arcand and Megan Watzke – have “a combined 25 years of experience working to bring the wonders of the cosmos to the public”. Both are involved in Outreach and Education for NASA, working to support  the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. They are Outreachers to their core, and it shows. Reading their book is genuinely like sitting in a hall, listening to them give a presentation.

The book is hardly revolutionary in its format, taking the reader on a trip through the universe, from the Sun to the distant reaches of the copsmos in the classic “astronomy road trip” way. But this is no ordinary, boring road trip that just stops at the most obvious places, the places everyone goes to. This road trip takes in places off the astronomical beaten track, oddities and curiosities. Yes, it takes you to the universe’s Mt Rushmores and Yosemites, but it also takes you to the quaint little towns tourists rarely discover, and the beautiful beaches and forests only the locals know about.

But really this is, as I said, a masterclass in astronomy Outreach. Reading it is honestly like listening to a skilled, knowledgeable astronomy lecturer, or in this case a pair of lecturers, Kim and Megan, who are superb and natural communicators. I do a lot of Outreach talks myself, and reading this book, thinking of it as a presentation in paper form, made me realise how far I have to go and how much better I can be. Kim and Megan give a presentation during which nothing jarrs, no jokes misfire, and heavy, hard science rubs shoulders easily and comfortably with “Wow! That’s amazing!” factoids and “Sheesh, I had no idea…” moments of scientific revelation. They explain the heavy, hard stuff clearly and concisely, translating the gobbledygook and jargon into easy-to-understand language which is, after all, what Outreach is all about, isn’t it? At several points in the book I read one of their descriptions and thought “Right, NOW I get that…” when a concept or theory I’d previously struggled with suddenly made perfect sense.

This is a bo0k clearly written by two people who love astronomy, and are excited and inspired by the universe. Reading it made me feel the same way, and I’ve been doing this stuff for almost forty years now! It’s a real “fan letter” to astronomy. It might be the authors’ jobs to tell people about the universe, but it’s their passion too. So many books lose sight of the fact that astronomy is exciting, and fascinating, and incredible, and just fill their pages with lists and tables, and trot out the same facts old about the Great Red Spot, or comet tails, etc etc etc. Not this one.

Of course it’s illustrated, richly – it’s commercial suicide for an astronomy book NOT to be nowadays, when there are so many websites offering jaw-droppingly beautiful astronomical images – and the pictures are well chosen, complementing the text perfectly. But to be honest I found myself skipping past the pictures to get back to the text, because reading it is just so much fun and so enjoyable. The text is littered with always relevent and appropriate pop culture references – movies, music, anything to engage with the readership. I just loved this paragraph…

“As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there are many moons around the planets in our Solar System. Some of them are simply fascinating. Science fiction writers have been drawn to moons as intriguing destinations for a long time – think of Endor from return of the Jedi or Pandora from Avatar. While none of the moons contains Ewoks or Na’vi, the moons in our Solar System offer compelling scientific reasons for exploring them. here we describe just a few of our favourite moons.”

That’s an example of how the text flows freely and without any jarring subject or topic changes, each page, each section connecting perfectly with the next, just as a good presentation should. Again, the sign of very skilled Outreachers.

If that all sounds very gushy, well, sorry, but it’s a book I’m happy to gush about! It’s not perfect tho. I’m not smitten by the look of the book, i.e its use of spacey header fonts and the layout, which makes the book feel a bit like a Star Trek spin-off book from the 1980s, but that’s just a personal thing; the contents are far more important, and I can’t fault them at all.

Go into your local bookshop (or bookstore, hi, US readers!) and you’ll be faced with a huge choice of popular astronomy titles, all staring at you from the shelves purring, pleading “Buy me… buy me…” Which do you choose? Well, if it’s there, you’d be hard pressed to beat this one, in my opinion. If you buy it you’re effectively arranging for a private astronomy Outreach talk to be given in your own front room, or study, or wherever you read, by two extremely skilled communicators. They’ll show you beautiful pictures, and explain clearly how amazing the universe is, and how we’ve learned so much about it.

Highly recommended.

“YOUR TICKET TO THE UNIVERSE – A Guide to Exploring The Cosmos”

Smithsonian Books

Kimberley Arcand and Megan Watzke

ISBN 978-1-58834-375-8

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Actually, the timing of the publication of this book is perfect, because it provides a perfect illustration of the importance and value of good Outreach, at a time when NASA’s Outreach work is being hacked and slashed back because of decisions made by politicians. I know that there’s a battle going on in the US now in the political world, and as a Brit I can’t, and don’t, claim to understand it, but it seems to me from this side of the pond that one of the US political parties is going completely gibberingly village idiot insane, embracing pseudoscience and downright finger-twirling-by-the-temple drooling, witch-burning, pitchfork-wielding lunacy.  I can’t understand it, it’s quite frightening. It’s as if they are terrified by science, and hate it, absolutely hate it. And because the only thing they hate more than science is the other political party, they’ve brought about a situation where the US budget has had brutal cuts forced upon it. One of the consequences of this is that NASA has made the decision to severely cut back on its Outreach and Education program – just at the exact moment in time when people need to be educated and informed about the value of science more than ever before, and the relentlessly marching armies of ignorance and superstition need to be pushed back.

This book is a perfect example of what great Outreach can achieve – it can help people understand their place in the universe, and open their eyes to the incredible things science gives us. I honestly wish that every one of the stupid, stupid politicians engaged in the current War Against Science in the US could be sent a copy of this book. It might help a few of them realise just how ridiculous they are, and how important Outreach is. Outreach is so essential, *so* essential; every talk, every website, every Tweet, every FB post, every computer-rendered image, is an investment in the future. To just cut it like this… How many childrens’ dreams will this drown? How many flames of inspiration will never be lit? I wish I could get them all in a room, lock the door, throw a copy of this book at them and scream  “You goddamned bloody idiots! THIS is what you are stopping!”It might be too late to stop a huge amount of damage being done, but History will judge them very harshly for this, the morons. In a thousand years time, when men and women finally stand on worlds orbiting faraway stars, looking for Sol in their night sky, their children will be taught in school about what happened, and the names of the cretins responsible will be spoken with disgust and contempt. That’ll be their “legacy”, the idiots.