Planets move relative to the stars always moving from west to east in the sky. Well almost always. Every once in a while, a planet will slow down in its apparent slide across the constellations each night. For a few nights it may even appear to have stopped. Then it…

Will Gater, who helped us out with the NAM Blog recently, is hosting the 49th Carnival of Space. There are some nice articles in it this week, particularly Out of the Cradle’s post on growing plants on other planets and Riding with Robots Victoria Crater animation.

Dugg from Daily Galaxy: NASA is serious about launching the most difficult mission ever attempted by the human race - putting an astronaut on Mars. The voyage will cover hundreds of millions of miles and take two and half years round trip.

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This is an awesome, and much discussed post from the Planetary Society blog: http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001305/

…think to yourself: this is Mars. I’m staring through the eyes of a rover that was only supposed to survive three months, maybe six, possibly a little longer; yet it’s been four Earth years since Spirit landed,…

I’ll put this one to you as simply as possible. It’s a picture from one of the Mars rovers that appears to show a person (or a rock), walking along the Martian surface. This person (or rock, probably) looks so much like that classic Big Foot picture that it makes…

I love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, known to its friends as APOD. So to honour that Great website, which has been running for more than a decade, I here present my own personal top ten list of APODs. They may not be quite the same as anyone else…

Every year it comes around now, the email that says Mars will be as big as the Full Moon in August this year. It is a junk email that was a misinterpretation of a Mars approach from 2003 and I’m glad to see that the Bad Astronomer is talking about…

I had my first day working for SETPOINT Wales yesterday in their mobile planetarium, the Stardome. I went to Crickhowell High School and had a great (if tiring day) giving a space talk and showing, what felt like hundreds of children, the constellations.

The reason I like talking about space is…

Mars is back, and doing things it shouldn’t! Our warring friend started May in the constellation Aquarius, it then moved into Pisces on the 8th. For a really cool thing (if you’re utterly geeky like me) you should look up between the 24th and 29th when it cuts across the…