Last night people across the UK saw bright objects in the night sky. The police in north-east were contacted by concerned members of the public reporting sightings of UFO’s lighting up the night sky.

“It’s hard to say exactly, whether it was a chunk of rock coming in from outer space, burning up in the atmosphere or a bit of space debris, we call it, space junk, which is basically man-made stuff from a spacecraft that’s burning up in the atmosphere.”

“[The meteor was] probably 80 miles up or so, high up, moving very fast, actually, 18,000 miles an hour, probably, at least.”

Dr Tim O’Brien, associate director of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, speaking to the BBC

It is thought that the “light display” was due to space debris burning up in the atmosphere. The timing, the brightness and colour of the meteors suggest that they were not part of the expected natural meteor showers.

Link

BBC News

I though I would link to some of the wonderful pictures of Mars taken by Curiosity.

Looking south-southwest from the rover’s landing site in Gale Crater.

Here is a panorama of the landing site.

Mount Sharp, a mountain inside Gale Crater, where the rover landed. Below the line of white dots, are relatively flat-lying strata that bear hydrated minerals. Hydrated minerals were not detected by the orbiters.

The layered base of Mount Sharp.

I for one think the images are just wonderful and I am sure they contain lots of good science. I will let the geologists and planetary scientists comment on that further.

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All the pictures here are taken from NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory website.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Follow the link for a better view of Gale Crater.

Link

Mars Science Lab

There are about one billion stars in there – this is more than has been in any other image produced by surveys

Dr Nick Cross, University of Edinburgh.

Astronomers have created an interactive mosaic of our Milky Way galaxy that shows something like a billion stars.

The project, which has been running for 10 years, combines data from the UKIDSS/GPS sky survey acquired by the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii with the VVV survey data acquired by the Vista telescope in Chile.

Astronomers at Edinburgh and Cambridge processed and compiled all the data used in the mosaic and have made it available to everyone around the world for study.

Check it out here.

Just a simple picture on the Moon in the sky on the evening on the 5th March 2012.