Found this image via Digg and it’s so cool I thought I’d share. One of those pictures where the the photographer captured something we’re all fairly used to seeing in a different way.

Don’t forget to Digg it…

If you haven’t heard of Photosynth, its an incredible idea from Microsoft’s labs (yes they do cool stuff too!). Basically the concept is that as more and more photos are taken of a particular object or location the better a computer could get at creating a sort of simulated view of it (a ’synth’) in which you can swing it about in 3D.

Since millions of digital photos are taken each week and uploaded all over the internet, the guys and gals at Photosynth are trying to demonstrate their impending software relase with a few choice examples from ‘the cloud’. In this example they have created synths of the buildings around the shuttle Endeavour.

Its Windows only, but more than worth a look. this is the future of digital photography and what a cool example subject. Go, now, to Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth. They also have a Notre Dame example.

Thanks to James for the tip on this one.

I recently saw a Digg article which linked to a space.com page about the 10 Strangest Things in Space. All but 2 of the items were not pictures at all but computer simulations, or artists impressions. So here to correct this injustice to phenomena everywhere I present the REAL 10 Strangest Things in Space - or at least in my opinion. Feel free to suggest any others in the comments.

V838 Monoceroti Expansion (Hubble)

It wasn’t anything interesting until it happened but the star V838 Monoceroti, which had simply sat in obscurity, flared up in 2002 to become 600,000 more luminous than our own Sun. It didn’t take long for the star to fade back into the darkness but the Hubble Space Telescope managed to get quite a few pictures of it during its active phase. (Click for animated version)

In this series of images you can see how the star’s outer layers were first expelled and then cut away by the powerful radiation from the star. The event was made even more interesting by the fact that a ‘light echo‘ was seen. During the expansion the object appeared to expand faster than the speed of light - the effect was however merely an astronomical optical illusion.

The Egg Nebula (Hubble)

Also known as CRL2688, the Egg Nebula shows a pair of mysterious ’searchlights’ bursting out from a dense cocoon of dust surrounding a hidden, Sun-like star. We see the light escaping in the directions where the cocoon is thinner. Objects like CRL2688 are rare because they are in a phase of their evolution that is short-lived. Images like this one are very important to understanding how stars like our Sun will ultimately die.

The Sun in UV (SOHO)

The surface of the Sun is far more active than most people would think. This ultraviolet video taken by NASA’s SOHO spacecraft gives brilliant detail. It allows us to see one full revolution of the Sun on its axis, which normally takes about 25 days. In this video you can make out large flares erupting from the surface and the striking magnetic loops that seem to whirl about them as they go. (Full 512×512 MPEG Here)
Red Square Nebula Nebula (Hale/Keck)

Discovered in 2007, this ruby-like nebula may be the result of two interacting stars. If one star is dying then the material from it may be dragged into a disc around the orbits of both objects. Material can then only escape from the system along the poles of the disc, resulting in two cones leading out of the stars. When viewed from the edge these cones seem like two triangles. Here the system is seen in the infrared. Structures like this are rarely seen in nebula but there is in fact a Red Rectangle Nebula which is less symmetric but still quite interesting to look at.

Abell 39 (NOAO)

Here we see an almost perfect planetary nebula that sits about 7,000 light years away in the constellation Hercules. The dot at the centre is the original star, which - as it died - released the expanding gas shell also seen clearly here. The ghostly appearance of the shell is due to the blue-green filter used to take the image, which picks out the oxygen emitted light at 500.7nm.

Saturn’s Rings (Cassini)

This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. Cassini was sheltered from the Sun’s glare by positioning itself behind Saturn. Ring structures are revealed here in detail as they brighten substantially at viewing angles where the Sun is almost directly behind the objects. These observations allowed Cassini to detected two new faint rings.

The Horsehead Nebula Swallowed Something (SCUBA)

Observers used the JCMT submillimetre telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take this image of the familiar Horsehead Nebula, who’s outline can be seen here. When observed at 850 microns, we are seeing the cold dust at temperatures close to absolute zero. This dust is deep inside the optical nebula normally seen, which is transparent at this wavelength. It seems from the image that the Horse has swallowed a ‘lozenge’ which is in fact a region of dense dust that may be collapsing under gravity. In fact this could be a star system in the making.

Gomez’s Hamburger (Hubble)

Arturo Gomez found this odd object in 1985 and it became known as Gomez’s Hamburger for obvious reasons. It is actually a proto-planetary nebula, an earlier version of Abell 39 perhaps. The curves of light (the bun) are reflecting light from the star which is being obscured by a thick band of dust (the burger). The whole thing is only only a fraction of a light year across and located 10,000 light years away in Sagittarius.

The Solar Spectrum (NOAO)

If you could catch a rainbow and put it under a microscope you would see that it was not a continuous blend of colours. Along the width of it would be seen, scattered irregularly, dark patches. Atoms and molecules in the Sun’s atmosphere pick out specific frequencies of light and absorb them, diminishing their intensity by comparison. This images shows the spectrum of light from the Sun stretched out to make these absorption lines visible. We use the reverse of the idea (emission lines) when we make coloured lights. For instance, we excite sodium atoms to emit a signature orange light in street lamps. In this image you can see two prominent dark bands in the yellow-orange section which are the absorption due to sodium.

Update to This Entry

The Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared (Spitzer)

By looking at things in different wavelengths we can see much more than meets the eye. This image is a perfect example. Just as with the Horsehead image above we are seeing cooler material. This time it is dust in the Sombrero galaxy. The red ring is a thick band of dust encircling the whole galaxy. In the optical, this dust ring is what gives the Sombrero its distinctive black, obscuring line.

Oddities in the Orion Nebula (Hubble)

Deep within high resolution images of the Orion Nebula taken by Hubble we can see dark blobs. When you take a closer look you can see that these are like little flattened blobs. Some show a dim, red glow at their centres, others are just dark. These are proto solar-systems.

The red glowing is a protostars attempting to burst through and the dark disks are thick dust regions where one day planets may form. 6 billion years ago, this is what our Solar System may have looked from very far away.

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 that I like to put across the idea that we are on a round, spinning planet which is orbiting our star, the Sun. I spoke about the solar system and the Milky Way and also a little on black holes. These were Year 9 children which means they were 13/14 years old. I thik on the whole they enjoyed it, and certainly there were a few kids here and there who I could tell were very into it all. So that was nice.

Today I spotted on digg.com/space that there is a great image taken of our little spinning rock, from another neighbouring one. This is just the kind of thing that I really like, because this picture, taken by the Mars Global Surveyor in 2003, shows the Earth and Moon as well as Jupiter and its moons. Both of these planets would be very much visible from Mars. In fact the Earth must appear quite bright in the Martian sky, much as Venus does here. Click for a larger version - which is well worth doing.

So that you can orient yourself, this diagram shows the angle from which the image was taken and below it is a map showing the area of the Earth which was visible at the time of the photo, you can see that the fuzzy blobs visible were in fact the Americas.

Amazing picture here of the Northern Lights from space. Spotted on Digg (link here). The Aurorae are created by the interaction between outflows of energetic material from the Sun and the Earth’s ionosphere. I have never seen any, but very much would like to.

This image appeared on APOD the other day. It shows a solar eclipse as viewed from space. Very cool.

This image was taken from the old MIR station during the August 11th 1999 eclipse which was, if you can remember, visible from the UK. In fact if you look very closely you might be able to see me sitting on a ship in the English Channel. Oh wait, no you won’t because it was cloudy. As you can see though, despite the cloud it did go very dark.

Here’s a great image of all the bodies in the Solar System in order of size. It only goes down to a diameter of 200 miles - otherwise it would get very silly indeed. Note that several planets fall after several moons in the rankings. also note the small collection of dwarf planets and transneptunian objects from Eris onward. Also, for the sake of my own blog, I have rotated the image by 90 degrees. Get the correct orientation here.

From Bad Astronomy and Universe Today’s forums, via the Bad Astronomy blog.

These days we’ve all seen pictures of other worlds in stunning detail. We are familiar with pictures of the Moon and of the Earth and well know that the circles we see online and on paper are really globes, floating around in outer space. Now NASA’s STEREO mission to observe the Sun as it interacts with the Earth is giving us our first 3D images of real events. Anyone can knock up a computer generated model of the Sun or anything else but these are real images taken of the star we see in our skies everyday (well that’s an exaggeration, I suppose).

You’ll need to dig out a pair of standard 3D glasses to see the current slew of pictures and videos but they are well worth it. You can watch solar flares in 3D and see the Sun rotate. At present the videos are sadly not very high resolution, but the images are and look quite stunning, click on the ones below for larger versions. I hope that someone can reprocess these in different ways to enhance the 3D component as i’m sure there are clever things to be done.

The STEREO mission is made up of two identical spacecraft called STEREO-A and -B. The A (for After) craft trails behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, whilst the B(efore) craft goes ahead of us. The twin craft are loaded with scientific instruments for measuring the material ejected from the Sun and how it interacts with the Earth. This is the same material that causes the aurora here on Earth and which can damaged power grids and satellites or even kill astronauts.

As time goes by the two craft will move about, changing their angle of viewing of the Sun and Earth. This will enable better creation of 3D images amongst other things, but more importantly will give researchers a fuller view of the relationship between the Sun and Earth, which is now a very large field in astrophysics, as was demonstrated by the huge number and variety if talks on the subject at NAM.

STEREO has only just begun to take real observations in the past couple of weeks and new and exciting data and images are sure to start pouring onto the internet and into journals.

My NAM 2007 photos are up on Flickr. not very astronomy related, more the social side. Will put up a scientific version soon…

Greenbank Building

Originally uploaded by ttfnrob.

Obviously not vietNAM but the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting. This is my first NAM and so far it’s so-so. There have been interesting talks and I have met some interesting people. However so far I would call it fun or jolly.
Basically every year the UK’s astronomy community gathers together an holds a week of talks discussing and presenting and displaying the things that they do.
My particular topic, Star Formation, gets full coverage on Friday so until then I am hitting all the aspects that I find useful or intresting that are being held elsewhere. I went this morning to the Education and Public Outreach talks and found them really interesting. Did you know that 2007 is the International Heliospheric Year? (Link) Also 2009 will be the UN’s International Year of Asrtonomy (Link).
I have seen some very cool videos of the Sun, which I will blog about later too.
The photo above is of the main building in which this is being held, the Greenbank Building in the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.
Finally I’d just like to say that as I write this I have become one of those annoying people who sits on their laptop during a conference - yay for free WiFi!

Magnet Levitates

Originally uploaded by ttfnrob.

In last week’s lab we had some more fun with liquid nitrogen. This time we used it to cool a ceramic superconductor (i.e. not a metal one) and then floated a magnet on top of it. The result in shown in the image above.

What your seeing is a magnet inducing a magnetic filed on the superconductor which itself does now allow the free flow of the electrons to occur since it has been cooled. The two magnetic fields sit equal and opposite to each other and so the small magnet just floats.
The same principal is in use in high speed trains in Japan, only on a much larger scale.

Dydd G?yl Dewi yn y Labordy Ffiseg

Originally uploaded by huwwaters.

I don’t speak Welsh but assume this says something like ‘daffodil that was frozen in nitrogen and then crushed during first year physics lab’. I know that because I crushed and froze it myself and this photo was taken by one of the lab students, Huw Waters.

The daffodil only took a few seconds to freeze after I dipped it into the liquid nitrogen. We then crushed it as it had the texture of tissue paper and I held it for a moment until the cold started to seep through the glove. I placed the yellow shards onto the black plastic mat and then later we put another, unscathed, daff next to it as a nice comparison.

This was of course all in aid of St. David’s Day which is on March 1st and in Wales at least, a big deal. I hereby chair Huw as the bard for this lovely photo and curse myself for next bringing my camera along. Next week: we freeze bananas!

M16 The Eagle Nebula

Originally uploaded by ttfnrob.

Today I had the chance to quiz my friends Fraser and Vanessa about the Faulkes Telescope. Faulkes is actually two scopes - one Northern one Southern - which are robotic. They can be controlled by various groups around the world who might oherwise not have access to such technology. One such portion of the population are schools. Schools are able to sign up - for free - to Faulkes to observe in half hour session, anything they like. The telescopes are controlled via the internet from the classroom and via a webcam you can see Faulkes moving around as it follows your commands to go and see different objects in the sky.

In British schools the time difference to Hawaii makes for great timing. From 9am to 3pm the telescope is usable, weather permitting, live via the web.

This image of part of the Eagle Nebula (M16) was taken by students at Highgate School. It shows some foreground stars and then the stellar nursery within the tendril like fingers of the Eagle.

Although I cannot use the telescope myself - I am not a school - I am able to access the archived public data and thought it was all so interesting that I would blog it. Well done Faulkes, this is certainly a project I would have died to try out when I was at school and I hope it well used. There are some excellent pictures in the archives and you can find some of the best over at www.faulkes-telescope.com or my own picks at www.flickr.com/photos/ttfnrob.

two

Originally uploaded by late night movie.

So I think we just had Winter. Thursday and Friday’s snow fell hard and fast but was gone just as quickly in the end. Which was a bit sad. Although I have heard reports that in the Brecon Beacons the sledging was excellent over the weekend.

I found this photo on Flickr of the snow in Alexandra Gardens in Cardiff. The two yellow flowers poking through show how slightly confused the plants seem to have been by the recent weather but also how pretty the brief blizzard was.

Monty the Snowplough

Originally uploaded by ttfnrob.

Our little monster, Monty had his first try out in the snow this morning. At first he was very wary but soon got over his fears and started to tunnel around the garden using his nose. He would bundle up a small roll of snow and then attack it. This repeated over and over for about ten minutes until I dragged him inside to dry off.

The dog remains generally fearless and seems to take part in almost any activity with gusto, which is great to see. I think he even enjoyed his bath the other day, and now may be needing another.

Sometimes I’ll see a photo that just blows me away! This is a very good example. I wish I could take a photo like this but I really don’t see how it could ever happen given my impatience and lack of technical knowledge.

I found it on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website for February 7th and it was taken in Perth, Australia on January 26th by Antti Kemppainen. It shows a collection of people on a beach looking out at three things: fireworks, comet McNaught and a thunderstorm. It was made up of three seperate pictures but the combined digitally edited effect is quite stunning.

This photo is best viewed large, so please click on either it or the link to the APOD site to get a better look.

St. Davids Sunset at Cardiff Bay

Originally uploaded by ttfnrob.

This was one of those ‘thank god for cameraphones’ moments. I just happened to see this sunset and just happened to be at a great spot to take this picture of the St. David’s Hotel on Cardiff Bay.

We had just been for a tasty lunch at the Waterguard pub and were walking back to the car when I saw it - lovely! I am very lucky to live in a place as pretty as Cardiff and sometimes I need a picture like this one to get me through the rainy times.

Big doesn’t quite cover this blog post.

For the past few weeks in my role as a demonstrator in the first year undergraduates lab, I have been supervising the experiment titled Large Scale Structure of the Universe. The experiment itself is a slightly painful exercise involving a series of simulated optical telescopes on an odd piece of software installed on the lab computers. The students have to find the galaxies, which I give to them on a piece of paper, and then take a fake spectrograph reading for each one. This enables them to dot-by-dot create a small, 3D slice of the universe where they can see how far away each galaxy is from Earth and the structure the galaxies take on the largest scales.
They are, understandably, not too thrilled at this. Lab takes four hours and the preamble to this experiment takes a good hour on its own. When it is complete, and they have say, an hour remaining of lab, in which they must answer a series of questions based upon the data they have taken and the completed set of many more galaxies printed in their lab book already.

Now ignoring the fact that they seem to have taken the data for no reason at all and that this is a sure-fire way of ensuring they learn to loathe astronomy as a boring, long-winded science, what they end up with is quite interesting. Naturally none of them see it as interesting as they have been steadily bored by it for a whole afternoon, which is a great shame.

The reason it is so interesting is that on the very largest scales, the Universe has a structure. When one looks into the sky and sees the myriad of stars, nebula and galaxies one could be forgiven for thinking that the universe was pretty randomly distributed. Yet given a little thought this doesn’t seem obvious at all because eveything we have yet discovered seems to have an order.

The Earth goes around the Sun, the Sun around the centre of the galaxy. The galaxy itself is part of a larger collection of gravitationall bound galaxies called the Local Group. The Local Group is part of a larger collection known as a cluster. The clusters collect into super-clusters. There is structure at all levels. Yet at its highest order of size, the Universe still shows form and shape.

Taking every galaxy as simply a dot and then assembling all the dots together into a picture containing millions upon millions of galaxies we see the Universe looks a bit like foam. The matter (i.e. all the galaxies) mostly exisitng on the surface of bubbles, within which lies great voids of space. These regions are unimaginable large and if you were to sit at the centre of them it would be incredibly dark as there would be no stars to light things up.

There are many people studying the structure of the universe at this level. There is a survey, as a good example, called the Two degrees of freedom galaxy redshift survey, or the 2DF Survey which you can read more about at this link

What I wanted to post here though was deatils of the Millennium Simulation. In the words of the Virgo Consortium that carried out the simulation, it is

“…the largest [computer] Simulation ever carried out, containign over 10 billion particles. The simulation was carried out by the Virgo Consortium using the a cluster of 512 processors located at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. The simulations took a total of 28 days (~600 hours) of wall clock time, and thus consumed around 343000 hours worth of cpu-time.”

What the simulation produced, amongst other things, was a series of movies and images from a simulated Universe. In these animations the camera flies around the universe, showing in rich detail the current best model for what the universe looks like at such large scales. It is quite beautiful to watch and I suggest you do. There are two versions of it: a 60 MB version called the Fast Flythru and then a 120 MB version which is the same journey but done more slowly so you can take more in. Both are DivX files.

A whole host of video and images are available on this website, which outlines what you’re looking at as well. You can look at the Universe as it is now or watch it evolve from its early stages to the present day.

Obviously even at 10 billion particles, the Millennium Simulation doesn’t even start to approach the actual resolution of the Universe but this is worth a look and certainly gives you an idea of exactly how teeny tiny we are here on Earth and how remarkable it is that we are able to discover such enormous ideas.

The last time it happened was in 2003 and the next time will be 2016. The November 2006 transit of Mercury was watched by millions of people and a few spacecraft too.

Occuring between the evening of Wednesday 8th of November to the morning of Thursday 9th, GMT, Mercury appeared to move slowly across the solar disc, looking like a tiny black dot merely 1/94th the size of the Sun. On this occiasion it wasn’t visible from the UK, unlike the Venus transit two years ago.

However in the wondrous age of digital photography and the internet, this doesn’t stop us seeing some lovely pictures. A Flickr search for ‘mercury transit‘ yeiled a whole host of nice images taken by keen observers the globe over.

If you want to know more about the transit, the BBC have a very good page on the story (here) but I shall be happy here with a small collection of the best images from the web.

This is one of the best from the Flickr Collection.

I like this one showing a composite of four stages as Mercury passes across the solar disc.

This was featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day. Mercury is the little dot on the left-hand-side of the image.

To finish this animation of the 2003 Mercury transit is quite captivating as is shows the sheer scale of the Sun compared to it’s first planet. This is taken from Thierry Legault’s incredible image archive.

Well today is day three (techincally) of my PhD. Monday was just an enrolment day and so yesterday was my first hands on day in the office. It is nice to be back. i’m not really wandering the same corridors as I did before and due to my two year absence I am also no recognising too many faces so in many ways it feels like I’ve started in a new place.

What is nice is that I still have the benefits of beinh ‘home’. I know where everything is and how far home and town and othe ruseful locations are situated. There at least a couple of people around that I studied with and although they are in their third and final PhD years, it has been nice to chat about the place and the dos and don’ts of life here.

As for what I’ve been doing with my time, well thats a bit odder and unfamiliar to me. I have been reducing data. Translated this means I have been turning streams of bits into images for analysis. As I understand it - and I really don’t very well at all - I have ben given the simplest kind of dataset to reduce at the moment. They are called Jiggle Maps and I am able to downbload them from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, which seems to house a lot of the SCUBA camera data. SCUBA, located at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, is the predecessor to the instrument I shall hopefully be using in the coming few years to observe the sky at sub-mm wavelengths. (To read more about SCUBA check out this short publication from the JCMT).
So today I made my first proper image of a sub-mm source. Taken from the SCUBA archives from 11th April 2000, I reduced this image from one set of observations that night. The object in question is located at RA 19h 03m 59.81s Dec -37d 15′ 30.7″ and is mostly like a chunk of a nebula.

Above we can see it in a simple one-colour spectrum showing intensity of the sources. Below I have put in a false-colour image of the same source which enables you to pick out a little more detail.

What you’re seeing are actually five disctinct objects. The two outer objects, that are not as bright are thought to be t-tauri stars (young, new stars) whilst the central blobs represent three, even younger objects. The left-hand central object is thought to be two protostars only slightly distinguishable here but more resolved in other data. The right-hand central object is supposed to be a pre-stellar core. That is to say that it has not yet become a star and may well in the near future.

All this data is properly collected and detailed in a paper by Nutter, Ward-Thompson and Andre that was published in 2005 title ‘The pre-stellar and protostellar population of R Coronae Australis’.

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (seriously what a great website) we have an image taken from the Earth by an enthusiast in Normandy, France.

This incredible image shows the disc of the Sun with a sunspot visible in the top right part of the image. Shown on the left hand side are the silhouettes of the International Space Station and the space shuttle Atlantis which recently departed the station after dropping of the next crew.

A larger version of the image is visible at this link where you can see the station and shuttle in more detail. But here is chunk for you as well.

It is amazing to think that someone took this image from the ground. The Sun is so powerful that it creates very sharp shadows of objects passing through our line of sight with it. Tomorrow the Moon will do just the same thing as seen from South America as we have the final Solar Eclipse of 2006. Sadly not visible at all here in the UK.

As well as our own Moon passing in front of the Sun and creating an eclipse on Earth, we also can see eclipses occurring on other worlds. Jupiter’s four galilean moons are regularly seen moving in front of the planet and casting a shadow onto the gas giant’s surface. You can observe this even through a telescope in your back garden.

For the first time though, an eclipse has been seen occurring on Uranus, the seventh planet in our solar system. Hubble took this remarkable image of Uranus’ moon Ariel passing in front of the planet and casting a shadow down to the surface. Its incredible to see the detail that Hubble is able to capture as the 700-mile diameter moon moves along in its orbit.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey probes have discovered something quirky and highly unexpected on the surface of Mars. It appears that every Martian spring there are huge CO2 geysers erupting near the Martian south polar ice cap.

The teams working with the probes noticed that each spring, as the ice melts off the southern polar cap, a series of dark spots appear that are 15 to 46 metres across. Then a few days later dark fans appear next to these spots.

The team have now deduced that these are geysers of carbon dioxide gas, shooting at great speed out from under the surface of the polar cap.

The process discovered is unlike anything else seen in the Solar System to date and seems to be a regular feature of the Martian seasons.

During the summer the cap is just a water ice polar cap. Then over the colder months a three-foot layer of CO2 gas forms as ice over the top. As it does so, sand and other dust get trapped under neath. Then in spring as sunlight begins to pass through the cap again, the gas lower down sublimates and gradually forces its way up through weaknesses in the surface. Then as the light increases, more and more is released and shoots upward through the gaps at 100 miles per hour, taking the sand and dust along with it. This is what forms the dark fan shapes seen the image.

Ever since we (well not really ‘we’, more like ‘she’) redecorated the study, my telescope has been back in my life. It stands with its back to me looking at the wooden slats of the blind that covers the large window in the study.

Well would that be a lovely view?” it seems to say to me, “South facing too…

For almost a month I let it sit there dormant, simply not in the habit of using it. Every time I wandered into the study I felt a twinge of guilt that since I had bought the thing I used it possibly twice or three times.

But then it happened. Sitting outside one evening, the 6th day moon was making its way across our little garden and Jupiter and Saturn were sloping overhead too. It was time to act and so I grabbed the scope and starting looking. I’m really glad I did too. Two nights later I was back out, this time with the digital camera in tow and among others, I took the above picture of the Lunar South Pole.

The Moon is a lovely thing to observe from your back garden. its easy, its obvious and its ever changing. Each night you get a different view as the line between light and dark, known as the Terminator, moves gradually around the lunar globe. All the various oceans, seas, mountains and craters are given a few hours of stage time and if you’re lucky you’ll catch sights such as Copernicus and Plato as they are highlighted by the shadows they create.

So if you have a small scope or pair of binoculars, the Moon is well worth a look. It sits almost 240,000 miles away and the light we see from the Moon takes just 1.3 seconds to get to us. There are numerous maps and globes of the Moon that you can get hold of the help aide your observations. You can find a good site here (http://www.penpal.ru/astro/map.shtml) which lets you simply hover your mouse over anything you can see on the Moon’s surface and it will tell you what it is. Very handy for a first time observer.