If ever the sky clears, you might see some interesting clouds

No really. Mid-summer is the time for noctiluctant clouds. These are very high altitude clouds that appear to glow electric blue in the dark. You have to stay up very late to see them, and they seem to switch on for just a short period every year. Nobody really knows yet what causes them, but theories include space dust or possibly global warming. They are not the northern lights, but they are very special and rather lovely to catch in the midnight summer sky.

this picture was taken by Brian Whittaker as he flew his plane over Newfoundland on the 13th June.

source: spaceweather.com

Mega Moon rising

This weekend, the Moon will be closer to the Earth than it normally is, and will seem bigger in the sky than usual. On the evening of the 6th it will rise very big and full at about 8pm BST. If you can find a spot with a clear view of the south eastern horizon, this is a spectacle you should not miss!

Triple conjunction in wonderful viewing conditions

I hope you've all been enjoying this view this evening! You can see Venus (top) and Jupiter (lower) against a well-lit young Moon. Tomorrow's show should be just as good if you missed it tonight!

Duck!

What will you be up to on the 1st April? This is not an April fool's joke, but one of the things that will happen to you that day is that you will be narrowly missed by a sixty metre long asteroid called 2012EG5. It will be travelling at about 8km per second relative to the Earth, and will pass us at a distance of about 150 000 miles. There is absolutely no danger from this encounter, but it is the sort of thing that happens all the time without anyone really noticing. Objects like this are classed as NEOs - Near Earth Objects, and they have orbits that bring them, unsurprisingly, near to the Earth from time to time. One day in the future a NEO might  occupy the same orbital position as the Earth, at which point interesting events would unfold fairly rapidly. Astronomers are sure (to a high degree of precision) that there is virtually no chance of the currently known 1301 potentially hazardous NEOs hitting us any time soon.

Excellent new animation from NASA

This video shows a recreation of the way in which the Moon is thought to have formed, and how it got all the features we see today.