Just over a year ago, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe touched down on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The mission was an outstanding success, and revealed amazing images of a world both alien and familiar. During its nearly 3-hour descent, the probe measured powerful winds and sampled an atmosphere that contains a complex organic chemistry - possibly the same molecules present when our Earth was very young.

Astronomers think they might have found a "dark galaxy", that has no stars and emits no light. Although the galaxy itself, located 50 million light years from Earth, is practically invisible, it contains a small amount of neutral hydrogen which emits radio waves. If astronomers are correct, this galaxy contains ten billion times the mass of Sun, but only 1% of this is hydrogen - the rest is dark matter.

The supermassive black holes at the heart of most galaxies put out so much energy they churn the interstellar dust that surrounds them. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently took a series of images of 56 elliptical galaxies, and revealed that the hot gas and dust blasting out X-rays have a different distribution from the stars we can see. This gas and dust should have settled down millions of years ago, but it appears that these black holes are feeding so voraciously that they're continuously stirring up the material.

Astronomers from UC Berkeley University have recently discovered a spiraling magnetic field in space, wrapped around a long, thin cloud of gas and dust called the Orion Molecular Cloud. The coiled magnetic field has pulled this gas cloud into a thin filament. Astronomers have suspected that magnetic forces can define the shape of interstellar clouds, but they haven't seen evidence for it, until now. The Orion Molecular Cloud contains two stellar nurseries; one in the belt region, and another in the sword region of the Orion constellation.

The Orion Nebula is one of the most magnificent objects in the night sky, but it won't last forever. Fortunately, astronomers now think they know where its successor will show up. A glowing gas cloud in the constellation Cassiopeia called W3 has just begun to shine with newborn stars. In just 100,000 years, it should be blazing in the night sky; just as the Orion Nebula fades from view. W3 was recently found to have a collection of massive protostars packed tightly together, eating away at a surrounding cocoon of gas and dust that obscures them from view.

An international team of astronomers have turned up an enormous companion galaxy to our Milky Way - it was hiding in plain sight. The star cluster is only 30,000 light years from Earth, and contains thousands of stars spread over an area 5,000 times larger than the full Moon in the sky. These stars don't fall within the Milky Way's spiral arms, galactic bulge or spherical halo, so astronomers figured they must belong to some other object. It's probably the remnant from an ancient galactic merger.

A new instrument called Exoplanet Tracker has turned up an extrasolar planet orbiting a star 100 light years away. This instrument is designed to detect subtle shifts in starlight as a star moves back and forth through interactions with its planet. The Exoplanet Tracker is much cheaper than traditional spectrographs, costing only $200,000, and capable of being installed on lower power telescopes. Although this version can only watch one star at a time, future improvements should allow it to monitor 100 stars simultaneously.

This outstanding photograph of the Orion Nebula was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The space-based observatory built up the photograph over the course of 105 orbits around the Earth. The full sized image contains a billion pixels, and astronomers were able to discover 3,000 stars of various stars. Hubble also spotted a collection of possible brown dwarfs, which aren't large enough to sustain fusion reactions in their cores.

According to new observations from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Vega appears to have a huge difference in temperature between its equator and poles. Vega is the 5th brightest star in the sky, completing one rotation every 12.5 hours. Its high rotation speed flattens out the star, so that it's equator is 23% wider than its polar diameter. This result confirms the theory that rapidly rotating stars are cooler at their equators.

A new computer simulation developed at the Carnegie Institution suggests that planets can form and survive around binary star systems. Astronomers previously believed that the complex gravity would make gas and dust too unstable to form planets, but this simulation indicates that this gravity might actually accelerate the process, causing large clumps to form in a matter of only 1,000 years. Since 2 out of 3 stars are members of multiple star systems, this raises the number of planets that might be in the Universe.

Salmon have an heriditary instinct to swim upriver against the stream. The same inate drive pushes some scientists to replace theories of the day with their own perceptions. These avant garde specialists are unafraid to tackle mainstream ideas in the belief that their views are correct. Jane Gregory's book, Fred Hoyle's Universe shows how Fred Hoyle fits this description of an original thinker in his near ceaseless, lifetime espousement of fresh ideas. The current of conformity never seemed to be too daunting as he went about following his own pursuits.

Polaris, or the North Star, is one of the most famous stars in the sky. But did you know it's actually a triple star system? In a small telescope it's easy to see two stars, but it took the massive resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope to spot the third. By resolving this third star, astronomers hope to be able to accurately measure Polaris. This is very important because Polaris is a member of a special class of stars called Cepheid variables which are used by astronomers to measure distances.

This beautiful photograph taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope shows a region of space containing one of the largest clusters of stars ever seen. It appears to weigh in at 20,000 times the mass of our Sun, and contains at least 14 red supergiant stars. These supergiant stars are about as large as stars can get, and will die a violent supernova death within only a few million years. Spitzer used its infrared instrument to peer through the thick gas and dust that shrouds the centre of the Milky Way, obscuring them from view.

Astronomers have discovered that nearby satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, are interacting with local dark matter to warp the disk of the Milky Way. It was originally believed that the Magellanic Clouds had too little mass to affect the shape of the Milky Way. Researchers from UC Berkeley have created a simulation that includes data about the Milky Way's dark matter. As the Magellanic clouds orbit our galaxy, they introduce a warp to our galactic disk that matches observations.

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! If you're not "seeing double" yet, you will by the end of the week as we explore the wonderful world of multiple stars systems. There will be plenty of lunar features to keep you busy and some history to study as well, so be sure to put on a coat if it's cold and head out tonight, because...

Here's what's up!

Astronomers have found evidence of monstrous black holes at the heart of galaxies with the mass of millions of stars, or ones with just the mass of a single star. But not much in between (100 to 10,000 stellar masses). One of the newest pieces of evidence for a medium-sized black hole was captured by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. It measured the orbit of a star trapped in a death spiral around one of these medium-mass black holes.

This moody image of Saturn was taken by Cassini on December 5, 2005. It was taken using a special combination of the spacecraft's spectral filters to reveal delicate haze in its upper atmosphere. A methane-sensitive filter makes the high altitude features stand out, while a polarizing filter makes the small haze particles bright. The small white dot at the right side of the rings is Saturn's moon Dione.

NASA's Stardust spacecraft performed its 18th and second-to-last flight maneuver on January 5th, perfecting its aim for Earth. On January 15, 2006, the spacecraft will release its sample return capsule, which will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. The capsule is carrying particles collected by Stardust as it passed through the tail of Comet Wild 2. NASA will then fly the capsule back to the Stardust Lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Astronomers from MIT and Williams College were fortunate enough to be watching Pluto's moon Charon at the moment that it passed in front of a very dim star. By measuring how the light from this star dimmed as it passed behind the tiny, distant moon, they were able to come up with a very accurate measurement of Charon's size (606 km or 377 miles). They also determined that the moon doesn't have any appreciable atmosphere, lending evidence that it was formed when something smashed into a proto-Pluto millions of years ago.