John Chumack took this picture of the crescent Moon and Mercury from Dayton, Ohio. John used a Canon 10D and 180mm lens at F5.6 on 400ISO for 1 sec. exposure while mounted on a tripod.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

Shevill Mathers took this picture of a recent solar prominence on the 4th, September from Tasmania, Australia.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

NASA and Sandia National Laboratories have been using a powerful solar tower to test new spacecraft materials. The tower reflects and focuses the Sun's radiation to blast spacecraft shields with the equivalent of 1,500 suns. This research effort is tied to a potential future mission to Saturn's moon Titan, which orbits in a very high-radiation environment. They have mimicked Titan's nitrogen-rich atmosphere for the tests, and the shield materials seem to have passed with flying colours.

Researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis have developed a "field guide" for planet hunters searching for other Earths. They modeled the chemistry of silicate vapour and steam rich environments, similar to the early stages when an Earthlike planet is forming. During this stage, the planet is covered with a magma ocean which vapourises. This is a very distinct moment in the lifetime of a planet, and should be detectable because silicon monoxide gas is easy to see in infrared and radio wavelengths.

New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that the largest asteroid in the Solar System, Ceres, might have huge reserves of water ice under its surface. Ceres is approximately 580 miles (930 kilometers) across, and resides with many other asteroids in a belt of material between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres' crust shows evidence of water-bearing minerals. In fact, if Ceres is 25% water, it would have more fresh water than what we have here on Earth.

This is an image of the Biblis Patera volcano's caldera which was taken by the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. Biblis Patera is nearly 170 km (106 miles) long, 100 km (62 miles) wide, and its summit is 3 km (1.9 miles) high. The bowl-shaped caldera might have formed when a magma chamber collapsed during an eruption of the volcano.

Even though Deep Impact smashed into Comet Tempel 1 several months ago, scientists are still analyzing the data gathered before and after the collision. Very few close up pictures of comets have ever been taken, so the data gathered by Tempel 1 is very valuable, and sometimes surprising. The nucleus of Temple 1 has layers that show in topographic relief, ranging from smooth surfaces to impact craters. It's also extremely porous, which allows the surface to heat up and cool down almost instantly when hit by sunlight.

Cassini has found that Saturn, like the Earth, has many different kinds of clouds. Some are hazy bands, high up in the planet's atmosphere, while others seem to go much deeper. These deeper clouds live about 30 km (19 miles) under the cloud surface and seem to be isolated features that have different shapes, like ovals, donuts, and swirls. There are also dozens of "lanes" which go completely around the planet, similar to the bands which can be seen in many telescopes, but are much narrower.

Greetings, fellow Sky Watchers! While the Moon will figure prominently in our studies this week, let's start off with telescopic challenge - "Barnard's Galaxy". Do you only have binoculars? Don't worry, the NGC 6871 will surely please you. If you have eyes, then you're in luck as the Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Spica dazzle the western skyline and Piscid meteor comes to call. So, get thee out under the stars and in the moonlight, because...

Here's what's up!

Cassini scientists have announced a host of new findings about Saturn's rings, including some new knotted structures in the planet's F ring. One of the major discoveries is that parts of Saturn's D ring (its innermost ring) have relocated and dimmed. In fact scientists have been able to track fairly significant changes between when Voyager first visited Saturn 25 years ago. The delicate G ring seems to contain faint arcs, which might be hiding additional planets. And most surprisingly, knots in the planet's F ring seem to be arranged like a coiled spring winding around the planet.

The ESA's Integral space observatory and NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer spacecraft have found a rapidly spinning pulsar in the process of consuming a neighbour. This discovery supports the theory that pulsars spin so quickly because they pick up material from a companion, which increases their mass. Pulsars were once stars more than 8 times as large as our Sun, but their intense gravity compacted them down to a size of about 20 km (12 miles) across.

In this photograph taken by Cassini, you can see the faint moon Pandora moving through Saturn's F ring. As a shepherd moon, Pandora and its partner Prometheus confine and shape the main F ring with its gravity. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across. This image was taken on August 2, 2005, when Cassini was approximately 610,000 kilometers (379,000 miles) from Pandora.

There's a long chain of events that led from the collapse of our local cloud of gas and dust to the evolution of life here on Earth. Exactly how each of these steps unfolded is still a bit of a mystery, but scientists know that a few atomic combinations were necessary: water, and organic compounds containing carbon. Dying stars are the source for this carbon, which they belch out, creating a kind of carbon soot. From there, this soot is blasted by intense radiation to create more than 100 different molecules, including fatty acids and simple sugars.

Photographs of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have been assembled into time-lapse movies that show the planet's dynamic atmosphere and satellites. This natural view image is what you'd see if you saw the planet with your own eyes.

After 5 years of construction, the Southern African Large Telescope is now online, and has captured its first images - the beautiful Lagoon Nebula, globular star cluster 47 Tucanae; and NGC6744. The observatory has a massive 10 x 11 metre hexagonal segmented mirror, and state of the art scientific instrumentation. This new observatory provides a good view into the southern skies, which are less covered than the northern hemisphere. More scientific instruments are still being installed, and should be completed within the next few months.

This beautiful photograph looks down at Saturn, and partially through its rings from the unlit side. Apart from being a pretty picture, scientists can use images like this to precisely measure the concentration of ring particles. If you look carefully, you can also see Saturn's tiny moon Atlas (32 km or 20 miles across), as a dark spot in front of the planet.

NASA's Spirit rover has reached the summit of Husband Hill, and is now taking some time to enjoy the view. After climbing for months, the hardy rover is now 106 m (348) feet higher than it was when it first landed. This view from above gives mission planners a chance to analyze the terrain in all directions and decide where to send Spirit next.