Steve Owens, co-ordinator of the project in the UK, said he was hopeful parts of Scotland would become officially recognised by the International Dark Sky Association.

There are currently two internationally recognised dark sky parks in the United States and one in Canada, but as yet no area in Europe has been deemed perfect for dark sky gazing.

Mr Owens said he had been working with a number of organisations, including the country’s National Parks and Galloway Forest Park towards winning dark sky park status.

He said: “I certainly think Scotland has the best dark skies in Europe.”

The new initiative follows the success of Dark Sky Scotland, co-ordinated by the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, which drew more than 5,000 people to events across Scotland last year. The organisation is applying for funding to continue its work into 2009, including plans for “dark sky discovery sites” where city dwellers could learn to appreciate the night sky.

Read further at scotsman.com

The Image Group, Eccles-based large-format printer has designed and installed the stunning photographic exhibition to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide during UNESCO’s International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009).

The exhibition prototype sponsored by The Science Photo Library and Astronet successfully debuted in Liverpool’s Albert Dock in June. The exhibition featured 26 dibond panels measuring 3m x 80 cm showing images of galaxies, planets, stars, the Milky Way and as near as the Moon and as far away as 13 billion light years.

Liverpool was chosen to host the prototype display being the European Capital of Culture for 2008. The Albert Dock is the UK’s greatest collection of listed grade one buildings which means the Image Group had to adhere to stringent installation conditions.

For Image Group Dave Cousins said, “We had to ensure that there were no visible signs of our work. We used stainless steel sign banding secured with jubilee clips. Any excess was cut off afterwards. This meant that there was no need to drill and everything could be pre-made at the factory to minimise any public disruption.”

“From the moment we began putting the signs up the crowds started forming. There was tremendous interest and it’s exciting to think so many people throughout the world will see our work over the coming months.”

The aim of The IYA2009 is to celebrate astronomy’s contributions to society and culture, and to stimulate worldwide interest in astronomy. The exhibition called ‘From Earth to the Universe’ uses a mixture of images from professional astronomers using the biggest and best telescopes in the world. But there images from backyard astronomers with home telescopes and digital cameras also feature.

To reach the widest possible audience for this travelling exhibition, it will be displayed in non-traditional public venues such as parks and gardens, shopping malls, metro stations and airports in major cities across the world.

Read further at ajponline.co.uk

The Cardiff Half-metre Newise Telescope has enormous capability for carrying out astronomy, even through the bright night skies of Cardiff.

Its size makes it equal to the largest of any UK university teaching telescope, and enables a level of image quality unparalleled by similar sized telescopes of more conventional designs, providing the School with a very powerful tool for the teaching of practical astronomy.

Professor Derek Ward-Thompson, observatory director, said: “This is a fantastic opportunity for our students to learn astronomy on what is essentially a research-class telescope.

“It will also be a marvellous resource for the general public. They will be able to come and look through a state of the art astronomical telescope. We very much hope that as many people as possible will take the chance to come along and look through the telescope on our open evenings throughout 2009.”

Read further at newswales.co.uk

The West Wales Astronomy Group, which meets every month to share experiences and use telescopes to seek out constellations and planets, has been campaigning to turn off street lights in Pembrokeshire for a while now in an effort to prevent light pollution.

Without complete darkness, it can be difficult to pick out even the brightest of stars in the night sky.

West Wales Astronomy Group Treasurer Paul Conti commented: “We used to meet at Trefach in the Preselis and sometimes we’d have weekend-long star camps. Pembrokeshire was known for its dark skies, especially up in the Preselis and we’ve had some amazing pictures there.

Read further at westerntelegraph.co.uk

The event, at Kelling Heath Holiday Park, near Holt, will be the UK’s largest “star party” and will feature various forms of celestial entertainment.

Held on Saturday, September 27, it will attract more than 500 amateur astronomers and other intrigued members of the public to the 250-acre area of outstanding natural beauty.

The park is famed for being blessed with the some of the clearest and darkest skies in the country, allowing clear views of the planets and galaxies.

Richard Deighton from Loughton Astronomical Society, the star party organisers, said: “We choose Kelling Heath because it is one of the best sites in the UK for star gazing due to the very low levels of light pollution.

“This is thanks to there being few dense urban areas which omit a great deal of light and there is also very little industrial activity which produces atmospheric gases and clouds.”

Read further at epd24.co.uk

Most of the potential exoplanets imaged to date have been seen orbiting brown dwarfs, which are dim - making it easier to detect companion objects.

The new planet is huge, with a mass about eight times that of Jupiter.

The Canadian team that obtained the picture says the parent star is similar to the Sun but somewhat younger.

Three astronomers from the University of Toronto used the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take images of the young star 1RXS J160929.1-210524 and the planetary candidate.

The star and its companion lie about 500 light-years from Earth.

“This is the first time we have directly seen a planetary mass object in a likely orbit around a star like our Sun,” said lead author David Lafreniere.

“If we confirm that this object is indeed gravitationally tied to the star, it will be a major step forward.”

Read further at bbc.co.uk

In the transient media parlance, Gordon Ramsay is a ‘rock star’ chef, Dan Snow is a ‘rock star’ historian and Sarah Palin is now a ‘rock star’ politician. In the case of Dr Brian Cox, the soubriquet is not so much tired as justified. The scientist who leapt to ubiquity last week, enthusing over what he describes as mankind’s ‘biggest project since Apollo’, had a previous life in a Nineties band with regular gigs on Top of the Pops.

Cox played keyboards for D:Ream for the last time in May 1997. The occasion was New Labour’s election night party at the Royal Festival Hall, and the song was ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. In the years that followed, Britain got Blair and physics got its own ambitious, telegenic communicator in Cox. Today, as Blair’s heir is apparently sucked into a black hole, Cox is poised to slip the surly bonds of geekiness and become the god of small things.

A youthful 40, without a boffin whisker in sight, and articulating in the kind of regional accent that TV executives find ‘warm’, Cox became the acceptable face of physics last week when the world’s most powerful particle experiment was switched on at the Cern international science centre. In vast underground caverns near Geneva, the £5bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where Cox works on a particle detector called Atlas, has begun recreating the conditions present in the universe less than a billionth of a second after the big bang.

The event captured the public imagination, or at least the media’s, on the day with blanket coverage on Radio 4 and an image on Google’s homepage, which the internet company told Cox will have been seen by around half a billion people. To Cox himself fell the role of public oracle, conveying the strange beauty and violence of subatomic particles, and making unfathomably complex science accessible to the man in the street via BBC2’s Newsnight, Radio 4, Australia’s equivalent of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and countless other media.

He reeled off facts and figures of undeniable wow factor: the accelerator’s circumference of 27 kilometres, buried about 100 metres underground; the temperature inside the tube, -271C, colder than space, making it the biggest fridge in the world; a proton beam whizzing around one way - 11,000 times a second, with as much energy as an aircraft carrier going at 30mph - and another proton beam whizzing around the other way; the beams smashing together up to 600 million times a second.

Among the aims of the biggest experiment of all time: to isolate the elusive Higgs boson, or ‘God particle’, which gives the matter in the universe its mass. As Cox put it, with his gift for user-friendly terms, that really means: why is this table solid?

Read further at guardian.co.uk

Science business boss Maarten de Vries said Scotland was one of a declining number of countries with large areas free of light pollution.

He also predicted a boom if Virgin Galactic flights launch from Moray.

The success of stargazing project “Dark Sky Scotland”, meanwhile, could see it being rolled out across the UK.

Mr de Vries, who runs Black Isle-based Going Nova - a business promoting science and technology - said Scotland has large areas unaffected by pollution from artificial lighting.

He said: “There is certainly an opportunity to come here because of our pristine skies.

“There are still places in South America, the States and Spain where astronomers go to, but there are fewer places because of light pollution encroaching from cities.

“The night sky could be as important for tourism as Scotland’s landscape.”

Scott Armstrong, VisitScotland’s regional director, agreed Scotland’s “dark skies” were a boon.

He said: “The Highlands and other areas of Scotland are perfect for stargazers.

“There are vast areas with dark skies and limited lighting which makes Scotland a must visit destination, offering a unique experience to our visitors.”

Mr de Vries, who also leads the campaign Spaceport Scotland, said the potential of Virgin Galactic launching flights to more than 60 miles above the Earth from a site in Scotland had huge implications for tourism.

He said: “I believe a spaceport in Moray would be the most significant thing to happen in the area since the Romans.”

Read further at bbc.co.uk

That’s because the chairman of Norwich Astronomical Society is edging a tiny bit closer to the galaxies he loves, by training to become a pilot, as DAN GRIMMER discovered.

It was the awe-inspiring moment when Mark Thompson stared at Saturn through a telescope on the outskirts of Norwich that he fell head over heels with all things astronomical.

He was about 10-years-old at the time when his father first took him to the observatory at Colney where the Norwich Astronomical Society meets - now he’s the group’s chairman.

He said: “I hadn’t had any interest in astronomy before that and my dad had more of an interest than me. But when I saw the rings and moons of Saturn it was amazing.

“That was something that just stayed with me and started a lifetime of me spending far too much money to pursue a hobby that I loved.”

The former Thorpe St Andrew School pupil devoured all the books about space and was soon being driven to society meetings by his parents - who sat in the car outside while he lost himself in the world of stars, distant galaxies, planets and comets.

Read further at eveningnews24.co.uk

Topics will range from the history of astronomy to the science behind the Hubble space telescope’s most iconic images.

The highlight will be a talk on Sunday (September 7) at 1pm from legendary broadcaster and writer Sir Patrick Moore on his exploits observing the moon.

Sir Patrick, now 85 and still living at his home in Selsey, West Sussex, told the Gazette he was looking forward to the festival.

He said, “It should be a great success. I’m most looking forward to meeting old friends.”

Read further at eastbourneherald.co.uk

It was in August 1978 that the then teenage astronomer first invited his friends and neighbours in Rodway Close, Newtown, to look skywards and view the Perseid meteor shower.

Andy, now 45, said: “I was interested in space, but they did nothing at school so we had to organise our own in the street.”

Since then the Great Barr enthusiast has hosted hundreds of observation nights, lectures, presentations, local radio phone ins, school visits and even museum exhibitions to encourage the interest in space science in the city.

He has introduced many thousands people, including many wide-eyed schoolchildren, to the dust storms of Mars, the rings of Saturn and gas clouds of Jupiter.

During three decades he has organised 122 public observation sessions, 692 dramatic lectures, 111 exhibitions and displays and more than 100 further public workshops, demonstrations and experiments – much of it available to the public for free.

Andy’s tireless dedication has been rewarded with four awards from the International Planetary Society. Andy is now their UK coordinator

He said: “People are genuinely interested in space, but there is very little for the general public.

“Much of it is targeted at academics or students, or we have the Thinktank are aimed at young children.

“We have made it accessible for people and carried out some groundbreaking work.”

He is particularly proud of the Red Rover, Red Rover project in which he demonstrates a remote robotic rover on a simulated Martian terrain.

This has now been picked up and used by schools, colleges and institutions around the world.

Andy, an engineer by trade, was made redundant when rail manufacturer Alstom closed four years ago.

This and a growth of red tape and health and safety rules has meant he is less able to organise free events.

He also bemoans the lack of suitable and affordable venues in Birmingham, since the closure of the Museum of Science and Industry and winter closure of Soho House.

“Ten years ago there were more venues and they were more affordable,” he added.

Now he is lobbying for Birmingham to take part in the International Year of Astronomy in 2009.1978 - first public observation session in Newtown.

Read further at birminghammail.co.uk

A dark shadow will sweep across the surface of the planet in a broad arc as the Moon passes directly between the Earth and our star.

The eclipse begins in Canada’s high Arctic and ends in northern China’s Silk Road region.

Parts of northern Russia will go dark for two minutes, 27 seconds from 1021 GMT - but Britain will only experience a partial eclipse around 1016 BST.

That partial eclipse will be seen across most of Europe, Asia and north-eastern North America.

As is always the case with eclipses, tourists and amateur and professional astronomers have been flooding towns in the best viewing locations - along the path of totality.

In Novosibirsk, Siberia’s cultural and scientific capital, more than 5,000 foreign tourists were expected to show up in the city.

“The viewing points will be set up in the very beautiful historical and cultural places of Novosibirsk, there will be a number of telescopes there. Thirty-eight telescopes will be set up in the park on the River Ob embankment,” said local official Alexei Borisek.

Read further at news.bbc.co.uk

Newly uncovered inscriptions on the 2,100 year-old device reveal names linked to the Olympiad cycle of games once celebrated among ancient Greek city-states.

“It’s a surprise to find this on what we thought was an astronomical instrument,” said Alexander Jones, a science historian at New York University who coauthored a study on the findings that are detailed this week in the journal Nature.

Scientists have long studied the Antikythera Mechanism as a complex gearwheel system that displays the date, positions of the sun and moon, lunar phases, a 19-year calendar, and a 223-month eclipse prediction dial. But the latest findings suggest the mechanism had applications beyond mathematical astronomy.

“It’s not an instrument of pure science,” Jones told LiveScience. He added that it demonstrates “the relationship of cosmic time to human time.”

Studying the mechanism has proven challenging, because it remains fragile and encrusted with grime after divers retrieved it in 1901 from the shipwreck of a 1st-century B.C. Roman merchant ship. Over the past several years, 3-D X-ray scanners have helped reveal more of what amounts to a user’s manual inscribed within the layers.

Read further at livescience.com

CoRoT-Exo-4b is a planet around the same size as Jupiter. It takes 9.2 days to orbit its host star, which is one of the longest orbiting periods of any transiting planet ever found. The team found that the star, which is slightly larger than our sun, is rotating at the same pace as the planet’s orbit. This is surprising for the team, as the planet is thought to be too low mass and too distant from its star to have had much effect on its rotation.

Dr Suzanne Aigrain, from the University of Exeter’s School of Physics, who led the analysis of the photometric data, said: “We don’t know if CoRoT-Exo-4b and its star have always been rotating in synch since their formation about 1 billion years ago, or if the star became synchronized later. CoRoT will no doubt find many more transiting planets, and by systematically measuring their host stars’ rotation periods we will gain valuable insight into how stars interact with their planets”.

Launched in December 2006, CoRoT is the first space mission designed to search for extra-solar planets. The satellite uses transits, the tiny dips in a star’s flux when a planet passes in front of it, to detect and measure planets. This is backed up by extensive ground-based observations. Because it is outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, which distorts the light coming from distant stars, the satellite should be able to detect planets almost as small as our Earth. Because of CoRoT’s continuous coverage over several months, the team was able to track variations in the host star’s brightness between transits. To deduce its rotation period they monitored dark spots on its surface rotating in and out of view.

Read further at atom.ex.ac.uk

In a similar way that a fisherman would wear polarised sunglasses to help get rid of the glare from the water surface and allow him to see more clearly under the water, the filter on the telescope allowed the astronomers to see beyond surrounding clouds of dust and gas to the blue colour of the disk in infrared light.

It is believed that most, if not all, galaxies have a supermassive black hole in their centre, and this is an area of intense research within astronomy. Studying these black holes and discovering more about their structure can be difficult as they are so far away from us. Also, the clouds of gas and dust which surround the black holes make it difficult to achieve a clean, uncontaminated spectrum of the black hole vicinity.

Andy Lawrence, of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Astronomy, and co-investigator on the project, says For decades there has been a theory that supermassive black holes should be accumulating materials in the form of a disk but until now this has been impossible to test due to the contamination by the dust clouds.

Read Further at spacefellowship.com