Looking west after sunset on Friday September 26, the thin waxing crescent moon forms a triangle with Mercury and Spica, the brightest star in the constellation of Virgo. You can see how far Mercury has…
Take a look at the moon and it isn’t hard to imagine it as a planet. A 3,476 kilometres-in-diameter ball of rock, with basalt plains and mountain ranges, whose gravitational pull produces tides here on…
A beautiful full moon is set to rise this Sunday night, August 10. It will be spectacular and I encourage everyone to go outside and have a look. But the question is: will it be a supermoon? Technically…
The year’s biggest “supermoon” will rise on August 10. Like last time, there will be many pictures trying to showoff the “over-sized” moon. But I don’t think it deserves so much attention. At 7.09pm BST…
On the night of Monday August 4, mainland Australia will see Saturn disappear behind the moon. It’s the third time this year that the moon and Saturn will perfectly line up, as viewed from our part of…
Sunday marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, after multiple Apollo lunar missions unfolded through the 1960s in front of an awestruck global audience. But many wondered…
One of the main aims of the Apollo missions of the 1960s was to determine whether the moon had any water on it. If man were to build a colony on the moon, having water present would make living there easier…
In the Star Wars universe, everyone’s favourite furry aliens, the Ewoks, famously lived on the “forest moon of Endor”. In scientific terms, the Ewok’s home world would be referred to as an exomoon, which…
Finding liquid water on a celestial body within the solar system is exciting. The only thing that is probably more exciting is finding an ocean full of it. Today such news comes via Cassini, which has…
“Tide goes in, tide goes out…you can’t explain that.” So claimed US talkshow anchor Bill O’Reilly, in a baffling attempt to discredit atheism which became something of a YouTube sensation. I have been…
Earlier this week China launched one of its venerable Long March rockets. That event in itself is no longer news as China has become one of the world’s busiest and most reliable providers of satellite…
With India and China planning lunar surface missions, privately-funded space entrepreneurs competing for the US$40 million Google Lunar X Prize and discussions around lunar mining intensifying, working…
It seems like science fiction that 44 years ago Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin traveled nearly a quarter of a million miles to walk on the surface of the Moon. When the crew of Apollo 17 returned…
As a teenager I observed a strange phenomenon. On awakening from an unusually vivid dream, I would often find that the moon was full. And as the silvery light prevailed on subsequent nights, my nocturnal…
This Sunday night, June 23, at precisely 9.33pm AEST, the full moon becomes a “supermoon” – an especially bright full moon. This extra brightness occurs because the moon is closer to Earth than normal…
The United Nations’ Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is meeting in Vienna this week, and representatives of 74 countries will discuss, among other things, how to ensure space is maintained…
Like all relationships, our association with the moon has had its ups and downs. In this series we’ve talked about the nature of the satellite and how we think it was formed - in a giant collision that…