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The Space Shuttle Discovery launched yesterday towards the International Space Station, with not only the Japanese module of the Space Station, but also spare parts for their toilet! (see the full story on the BBC News).

We can actually see the International Space Station fly overhead - it is very bright indeed. And tonight (the 1st of June), for one night only, we can actually see the Space Shuttle Discovery fly over Europe just a minute after the station, as it plays catch-up! To find...

The long days of summer are here again, allowing us to make the most of a full day in the Sun. In June, the Sun is rising at 04:45 BST in the morning, and setting around 21:20 BST in the evening, giving us almost 17 hours of continuous daylight.

The summer solstice occurs on the 21st of June. That is the day that the Earth's northern hemisphere points in the direction of the Sun, making the Sun high in the sky at noon. At midnight, the Sun is only 15 degrees below the horizon, not...

The decent of the Mars Phoenix lander (and its parachute) was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE camera... And what an amazing photograph.

Note that, although it looks like the Phoenix is landing inside the crater, it is actually about 20km in front of the crater.

The first photographs from Mars Phoenix are now available at:

• BBC News
• NASA Phoenix
• University of Arizona

The NASA Phoenix mission to Mars has landed on the surface of Mars intact!

Previous missions have shown large amounts of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain. The Phoenix lander targets this region and will use a robotic arm to dig through the protective top soil layer to the water ice below and ultimately, to bring both soil and water ice to the lander platform for sophisticated scientific analysis.

Controllers were able to receive data for a minute after the landing, enough...

To see a satellite from the ground, you need them to fly over at just the right time - either dawn or dusk. In daytime, the sky is too bright to see them. At night, the satellites are in the shadow of the Earth an so cannot be seen.

The next six weeks are the perfect time to see the space station flying over head.

The amazing image to the left were taken by Dirk Ewers of Hofgeismar, Germany, using just a 5 inch refracting telescope!

If you want to see the space station fly overhead, all...

• NMM job opportunities: Director, Royal Observatory Greenwich The Director, ROG is responsible for ensuring the conservation, management and interpretation of the site is developed, implemented and maintained in a way that is consistent with the overall policies and objectives of the Museum

I bought a new digital camera a few weeks ago, and I was very impressed by its resolution - a whopping10 Mpx! (10 million pixels). But that is tiny compared to the digital camera involved in the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS project...

Their digital camera is a staggering 1,400 Mpx!

I would have to buy another 139 cameras to compete with that!

Pan-STARRS main aim is to repeatedly photograph the sky looking for potentially hazardous asteroids - we only know of 953 PHA's at the moment...

May is a great month for viewing planets!

The five major planets in our solar system are all easily visible to the unaided eye, which is why they have been known about since antiquity. If you have never seen a planet before, this is a good month to start looking for them. The only planet that cannot be seen this month is Venus, which is too close to the blindingly bright Sun to spot.

The sun sets at 20:45 BST mid-month, with nautical twilight (when the Sun falls to 12 degrees below the...

• BBC NEWS: Muslim call to adopt Mecca time "Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth." (tags: time Mecca science GMT Muslim longitude MagneticNorth clocks timekeeping)

Using three X-ray space telescopes - ESA's XMM-Newton, JAXA's Suzaku and NASA's Chandra - Japanese astronomers have discovered that the black hole at the centre of our galaxy was much more active 300 years ago, when it gorged on a large feast of nearby stars (for full details, see ESA's press release).

Imagine looking for a black object on a black background, and you will appreciate the difficulty in observing black holes! However, when a star or gas falls in towards a black hole, it...

Cosmic visions is a European Space Agency initiative to plan missions to be launched between 2015-2025. And there is no shortage of ideas!

Missions include:

• XEUS - the next generation X-ray telescope, designed to look at the hottest and most violent regions of space
• LISA - a mission to detect and measure gravity waves, emitted when massive objects violently collide
• SPICA - a mission to explore how stars and planets form
• PLATO aims to search for planets orbiting distant stars
• TANDEM will...

• Water Cooler Games - Chris Crawford's Nine Breakthroughs (tags: copywriting writing storytelling interfacedesign design verbs interface via:blackbeltjones)
• Museum Blogging: 10 lessons museums can learn from Twitter (tags: museums twitter copywriting)

Spring is here, so it is time to say goodbye to Orion until next winter! By the end of April, it will by hidden by the glare of the Sun, and during June the Sun will be directly above Orion.

The Sun is setting later and later, setting now at 8pm summer time. In fact, the Sun is setting 40 minutes later at the end of the month than at the start. Although the nights are getting shorter, making it more difficult for observing, it is also getting warmer - a welcome relief to anyone who has...

This years National Astronomy Meeting at the Queen's University Belfast came to a close on Friday, after 4 days of talks on the latest breakthroughs in UK astronomical research.

There were so many excellent talks this year, that it was impossible to keep up blogging about them! So expect a few more blogs to appear from me over the next week.

Many press articles were released during the week, including...

• World's largest digital camera to change view of the Universe
• Witnessing the formation...

Prof. Mark Bailey's (Armagh Observatory) public lecture at NAM 2008 celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event, when a large meteoroid exploded 5 miles above a remote region of Siberia.

The eyewitness reports of the event are, quite frankly, terrifying.

One of the newest topic in astronomy presented at this year's NAM was the atmosphere's in exosolar planets session. I find it staggering that astronomers can now study the atmospheric composition of planets orbiting distant stars!

The ultimate aim is to find an atmosphere around a planet that could sustain life. That has not been found yet, but it is only a matter of time...

There are two ways to study the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet. If the planet ever passes in front of the...

12 years ago, we didn't even know planets could exist around distant stars. Today, we know of almost 300 of them!

The exosolar planet session here at this year's NAM began with the announcement by Rachael Smith (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge) of the astonishing discovery of two asteroid belts orbiting the star eta Tel.

Such a system may sound familiar to you... that is because we have two asteroid belts in our own solar system! In our solar system, one is between the...

There is so much going on here at NAM about astronomy outreach that I have had to spread the news over two posts!

Lars Christensen indicated some of the many world-wide events that will be taking place to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, while Steve Owen highlighted some of the UK plans. Events include the 100 hours of astronomy on April the 2nd-5th 2009, the cosmic diary blog, and the spring and autumn moon watches.

Douglas Pierce-Price highlighted the involvement...

The Astronomy Education and Outreach session at this weeks NAM revealed lots of exciting events to look forward to over the next few years!

Iwan Williams (University of London) began the session by being happy that a small number of students were now beginning to get low grades in GCSE astronomy...! (The majority of GCSE students are 14-16 year old school children)

But why was Iwan happy about this? Well, it proves that a huge cross-section of school children with a wide range of...

What a start to this years' NAM!

The day began with the announcement (by Don Pollacco, Queen's University Belfast) that the UK Super-WASP project has discovered a staggering 10 new planets orbiting distant stars! (see the BBC News coverage)

We call such planets exoplanets. The new planets were discovered by looking at a vast number of stars every night and seeing if the brightness of any of those stars dipped for a few hours - the tale-tale sign that a planet had just passed in front of...

This week is the annual Royal Astronomy Society's NAM week - the UK's National Astronomy Meeting.

It is an opportunity for astronomers to showcase the latest astronomical research being carried out all around the UK. In 2007 it was been held at the University of Central Lancashire, in 2006 at the University of Leicester, and in 2005 at the University of Birmingham.

This year, we are at the historical Queen's University Belfast, with an attendance of over 600 astronomers from all around...

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The Cassini spacecraft performed a close flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Wednesday, passing within 50km of the surface at closest approach. Scientists are particularly interested to learn more about the icy plumes, rising from the south pole of Enceladus, that were discovered by Cassini in 2005. The spacecraft passed 200km above the south polar region this week – hopefully close enough to pass through the plumes and tell us more about these strange icy geysers. You can learn more...

The Moon has reached first quarter in its moonthly orbit around the Earth (a small mis-spelling of the word month, and you realise where the word originates from!). You have about 6 hours to admire the moon after sunset, until it too sinks below the western horizon, due to the relentless rotation of the Earth. Most of us are used to the familiar sight of the first-quarter Moon through our own eyes. But the sight through an X-ray telescope is perplexing, to say the least. As...