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The Moon Phase
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Naked Eye Astronomy
BBC News Magazine, 28-Aug-2009
Galileo first turned his telescope to the skies 400 years ago.
But even those without fancy equipment can watch the stars.
To mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first recorded discoveries in the sky through a telescope, 2009 has been declared the International Year of Astronomy by the United Nations and International Astronomical Union.
People around the world are being encouraged to do some star-gazing of their own.
New planet displays exotic orbit
BBC News, 12-Aug-2009
Astronomers have discovered the first planet that orbits in the opposite direction to the spin of its star.
Planets form out of the same swirling gas cloud that creates a star, so they are expected to orbit in the same direction that the star rotates.
The new planet is thought to have been flung into its "retrograde" orbit by a close encounter with either another planet or with a passing star.
Traces of planet collision found
NASA/BBC News, 11-Aug-2009
A NASA telescope finds evidence of a high-speed collision between two burgeoning planets around a young star.
The collision involved one object that was at least as big as our Moon and another that was at least as big as Mercury.
Martian methane mystery deepens
BBC News, 05-Aug-2009
Methane on Mars is produced and destroyed far faster than on Earth according to analysis of recent data, a study says.
Scientists in Paris used a computer climate model for the Red Planet to simulate observations made from Earth.
It shows the gas is unevenly distributed in Mars' atmosphere and changes with the seasons.
The presence of methane on Mars is intriguing because its origin could either be life or geological activity, including volcanism.
Experts puzzled by spot on Venus
ESA/BBC News, 01-Aug-2009
Astronomers are puzzled by a strange bright spot which has appeared in the clouds of Venus.
The spot was first identified by an amateur astronomer on 19 July and was later confirmed by the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft.
Sharp view of 'Orion's shoulder'
ESO/BBC News, 29-Jul-2009
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility in Chile has taken the sharpest pictures yet of Betelgeuse.
The star, which famously sits on the shoulder of Orion, is positioned some 640 light-years away and is one of the brightest objects in the night sky.
Chandra's First Decade:
The US space agency's Chandra X-ray telescope marks 10 years observing deep space
NASA/CXC/BBC News, 23-Jul-2009
Deployed by the space shuttle on 23 July 1999, the Chandra telescope is NASA's flagship mission exploring the realms of X-ray astronomy. The observatory, which is named after the Indian-American astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, orbits the Earth once every 64 hours.
In audio slideshow, Darren Baskill, an X-ray astronomer at the University of Sussex, explains Chandra's importance, and looks at some of the colorful images it has produced in the past 10 years.
NASA's Spitzer Images Out-of-this-World Galaxy
NASA/JPL-Caltech, 23-Jul-2009
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a wild creature of the dark — a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center.
The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars.
The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars.
The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star.
Our Milky Way's central black hole is tame by comparison, with a mass of a few million suns.
Titan: Treasures of Earth's oily twin
NASA/JPL/SSI/BBC News, 16-Apr-2008
If worlds have shadow twins elsewhere in the Universe, then Earth's would appear to lie just a block or two down the cosmic road, in orbit around Saturn.
Watching Galaxies Grow Old Gracefully
NASA/JPL, 14-Nov-2007
In the early 1900s, Edwin Hubble made the startling discovery that our Milky Way galaxy is not alone. It is just one of many galaxies, or "island universes," as Hubble dubbed them, swimming in the sea of space.
Speeding-Bullet Star Leaves Enormous Streak Across Sky
Click for full text and animation of the spectacular motion of this object.
NASA/JPL-Caltech, 15-Aug-2007
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Mit und Gegen, c.1929 by Wassily Kandinsky
