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Explanation: A crescent Moon and brilliant Venus met in predawn skies on December 7, a beautiful conjunction of planet Earth's two brightest celestial beacons after the Sun. Harder to see but also on the scene was Comet Catalina (C/2013 US10). The fainter comet clearly sporting two tails, lunar night side, bright sunlit lunar crescent, and brilliant morning star, are all recorded here by combining short and long exposures of the same field of view. Pointing down and right, Catalina's dust tail tends to trail behind the comet's orbit. Its ion tail, angled toward the top left of the frame, is...

Russia Is Planning To Build A Permanent Manned Base On The Moon Plans are being finalised Rob WaughRob Waugh – 10 hours ago Russia’s space agency is planning to build a manned moon base - launching modules into space on six separate rockets. Russia plans to launch a lunar probe in 2024 which will scout possible locations - before landing a man on the moon in 2030. Construction of the Luna 25 lander has already begun, the official state news agency Tass has reported. Once the components are in place, assembly of the moon base will continue over ten years....

It was no accident that Nasa crashed one of its Apollo 16 rocket boosters onto the moon, but the researchers never intended to lose it. In April of 1972, the booster drifted off and was never seen again, unable to transmit tracking data and reveal its whereabouts because of a malfunction. Now, almost 44 years later, the crash site of the Saturn V stage-three booster has finally been located.

This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation known as the SPACE Act of 2015 (The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act), which recognizes and promotes the rights of U.S. companies to engage in the exploration and extraction of space resources from asteroids and other celestial bodies. That’s a huge win for private space exploration companies, especially for companies with upcoming plans to tap into the economic potential of the moon. That’s because the legislation, in its definition of “space resources,” is sufficiently broad to include resources found on the lunar surface. In short, the moon could now be...

Got 20 bucks? You could own a piece of the Moon–or, at any rate, you could own a piece of paper telling you that you own a piece of the Moon. If that's too close to home, you can opt to buy property on Mars, Venus, Mercury, Io, or Pluto. The Lunar Embassy, owned and run by entrepreneur Dennis Hope, is able to sell shares in these important resources because Hope has declared himself to be the owner of several parts of outer space. So far, no one has formally challenged him. It's a surprisingly popular business plan. Although the...

Explanation: This was a sky to show the kids. All in all, three children, three planets, the Moon, a star, an airplane and a mom were all captured in one image near Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA in early September of 2005. Minus the airplane and the quadruple on the ground, this busy quadruple coincidence sky was visible last week all over the world. The easiest object to spot is the crescent Moon, which is easily the brightest sky orb in the featured image. Venus is the highest planet in the sky, with Jupiter to its right. The bright...

THE Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 never took place and were staged by the US intelligence community, a controversial filmmaker has claimed. Bart Sibrel claims he has proof the CIA orchestrated the famous Apollo 11 moon landing - and believes no one has ever stepped on the lunar surface because it is too dangerous. Speaking exclusively to Daily Star Online, Sibrel reckons mankind would have set up bases by now if it was possible to travel to the moon. And he believes the historic event took place in a film set and the crew were actors given instructions by...

MOSCOW (AFP) - Six Russian women on Wednesday clambered into a mock spaceship to begin a unique experiment testing how an all-female crew would interact on a trip to the Moon and back. For eight days, the female volunteers will live inside a wood-panelled suite of rooms at Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems, renowned for its wacky research into the psychological and physical effects of space travel. The institute in 2010 locked six male international volunteers in an isolation experiment lasting 520 days, to simulate a flight to Mars and back. "Such a crew is taking part for the first...

he European and Russian space agencies are to send a lander to an unexplored area at the Moon's south pole. It will be one of a series of missions that prepares for the return of humans to the surface and a possible permanent settlement. The spacecraft will assess whether there is water, and raw materials to make fuel and oxygen. BBC News has obtained exclusive details of the mission, called Luna 27, which is set for launch in five years' time. The mission is one of a series led by the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, to go back to...

Explanation: This sharp telescopic snapshot caught late September's Harvest Moon completely immersed in Earth's dark umbral shadow, at the beginning of a total lunar eclipse. It was the final eclipse in a tetrad, a string of four consecutive total lunar eclipses. A dark apparition of the Full Moon near perigee, this total eclipse's color was a deep blood red, the lunar surface reflecting light within Earth's shadow filtered through the lower atmosphere. Seen from a lunar perspective, the reddened light comes from all the sunsets and sunrises around the edges of a silhouetted Earth. But close to the shadow's edge,...

The discovery of water on the surface of Mars, which just happened to coincide with the premiere of the hit film The Martian, starring Matt Damon as an astronaut marooned on the Red Planet, has caused some degree of excitement for space enthusiasts. NASA is particularly inspired because its central organizing project is “the journey to Mars” which is scheduled to put astronauts on the Martian surface by the 2030s. The discovery and the movie certainly would not hurt the effort to gin up support for the humans to Mars program.

Be sure you know the right date and time of the eclipse. For example, the eclipse of September 27-28, 2015 begins at 1:07 UTC. For us in North America, that is 9:07 p.m.. EDT on September 27, 2015. Be careful. Watch the times. Note that the times are often given in what is called Universal Time, or UTC. Here’s how to translate Universal Time to your local time zone. ...

... Public Star Party begins 2:00 p.m. EVENT BEGINS 6:30 p.m. Livestream broadcast begins 6:30 p.m. Moon rises at Griffith Observatory 6:45 p.m. (Moon in partial eclipse) Totality begins 7:11 p.m. (Moon is totally covered in shadow) Maximum eclipse 7:47 p.m. Totality ends 8:23 p.m. (Moon emerges from shadow) Umbral eclipse ends 9:27 p.m. EVENT ENDS 9:45 p.m. Building closes (as usual) 10:00 p.m. Penumbral eclipse ends 10:22 p.m. Livestream broadcast ends 10:30 p.m. ...

Explanation: Tonight a bright full Moon will fade to red. Tonight's moon will be particularly bright because it is reaching its fully lit phase when it is relatively close to the Earth in its elliptical orbit. In fact, by some measures of size and brightness, tonight's full Moon is designated a supermoon, although perhaps the "super" is overstated because it will be only a few percent larger and brighter than the average full Moon. However, our Moon will fade to a dim red because it will also undergo a total lunar eclipse -- an episode when the Moon becomes completely...

Zodiac constellations this month include Sagittarius (the archer), Capricorn (the goat) and Aquarius (the water-carrier), and sinking into the west is Scorpio (the scorpion) with Saturn, our only remaining evening "star," in its midst. Three of our former evening "stars," Venus, Jupiter and Mars, are now morning objects, but only Venus, rapidly climbing into the morning sky before dawn, is much visible as yet. The autumnal (or fall) equinox is on Sept. 23, marking the end of summer and beginning of autumn. For the best spectacle of the month: A full lunar eclipse (sometimes called a "blood moon") occurs on...

China plans to send an unmanned lunar lander similar to previous probes but with a much heavier payload to the far side of the moon. Due to communications issues with the Moon itself blocking transmissions, China will undoubtedly launch a relay satellite in geo-synchronous lunar orbit to transmit data back, scientists say. The Chinese mission is set to determine how much of the rare element Helium -3, which exists in very small quantities on Earth, can be extracted from the purported rich deposits located on the moon's far side. H-3 is a light non-radioactive gas that has the potential to...

"You've heard of the supermoon before, and we have three of them this year. The first occurs Saturday, August 29th. A supermoon refers to a full or new moon when it's at its closet point (called the perigee) to Earth in its orbit. The moon can appear up to 30% larger than it's normal size from Earth. The full moon occurs at 11:35 a.m. MST on Saturday, so the moon technically won't be 100% full when it rises in the east at 6:54 p.m., but we won't be able to tell.

According to a Tuesday piece in Motherboard, Noam Chomsky, a philosopher and political commentator, and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and cosmologist, had a public dialogue about space exploration. Being both men of the far left, they concluded that space travel should be best left to robots and conducted by governments. The conclusions are the exact opposite of what the prevailing trends are in space policy.

One of the surest signs that late summer is here in the northern hemisphere is the arrival of the Milky Way in the early evening sky....the star-dappled plane of our home galaxy sits almost due south and stretches far to the north. This is also why we refer to the triangular shaped asterism formed by the bright stars of Altair, Deneb and Vega as the Summer Triangle. Two of these stars are the focus of a fascinating mythos from the Far East, and a poetic celestial configuration that commemorates star-crossed lovers lost. We first heard of tales of Tanabata while...

Humans on Europa: A Plan for Colonies on the Icy Moon By Don Lipper Special to SPACE.com posted: 07:00 am ET 06 June 2001 Forewarned is forearmed in science fact and science fiction when it comes to Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Frigid and ice-covered, Europa is believed to harbor a giant liquid ocean beneath its crusty arctic surface, a primordial sea whose tidal motions are driven by Jovian gravity and warmed by intense radiation given off by the giant planet. Yet despite the planet's fearsome environment, members of the Artemis Society, a private venture dedicated establishing a permanent, self-supporting community...