When the Sun rises on the Moon after two weeks of lunar night, the dust begins to stir. This dust storm stretches right across the Moon at the terminator (the line between day and night), from pole to pole. An instrument left by the Apollo astronauts to detect micrometeorite impacts first spotted this strange phenomenon. It could be that the night side of the Moon is negatively charged, and the day side is positively charged. As the terminator shifts across the Moon, it picks up the dust and shifts it sideways.

The ozone hole that developed above Antarctica looks smaller this year than previous years, based on observations from NASA's Aura satellite. The largest hole was measured in 1998; almost triple the size of 1985's hole. The temperature of the atmosphere above Antarctica seems to be one of the biggest factors deciding the size of the ozone hole - the colder it gets, the more ozone that's destroyed.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has wrapped up a successful year exploring Saturn's icy moons, and scientists have released a new set of images to celebrate. New images of Rhea were taken during Cassini's November 26th flyby, when the spacecraft dipped within 500 km (310 miles) of Rhea's surface. Other images include "zoomable" mosaics of Rhea and Hyperion taken at high resolution.

Astronomers from Rice University have created an amazing movie of jets of plasma blasting out of a newborn star. This series of images taken five years apart by the Hubble Space Telescope allow astronomers to track how material flows out of the star. Faster moving particles crash into slower moving material, and the resulting traffic jams create the spectacular shapes in space.

Germany's Carl Zeiss Optronics has signed a contract to supply the optical system for two instruments to be installed on the James Webb Space Telescope; the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Due for launch in 2013 on board an Ariane rocket, the telescope will be stationed at a stable position in space called the Lagrangian point L2. JWST will be cooled down to -230 degrees Celsius so that it's highly sensitive infrared instruments can peer through clouds of gas and dust.

This image of Saturn shows the giant planet's southwest edge, and a hint of thread-like cloud features. The edge of the planet looks smooth, but right at the terminator (the edge between light and dark), it's possible to see these cloud features. The long shadows make the height differences in the clouds visible. Cassini took this image on October 30, 2005 when the spacecraft was 401,000 kilometers (249,000 miles) from Saturn.

The history of our nearby Universe has been dominated by galactic collisions. More than half of the nearby galaxies have collided other galaxies in the last 2 billion year according to data from two comprehensive sky surveys. By processing 126 galaxies in the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey and the Multiwavelength Survey by Yale/Chile, researchers have found that 53% of galaxies have evidence of long tails of stars trailing away from them; the result of a recent galactic collision.

This perspective view shows the hilly terrain on Saturn's moon Titan. The image has been colour coded to show the altitude, with red being the highest areas, and blue the lowest. Stereo images were taken by Huygens as it descended into Titan's atmosphere earlier this year, and then the 3-D terrain was rendered in computer.

This Cassini photo shows two of Saturn's moons, Dione and Enceladus floating just beneath the ringplane. Smaller Enceladus is on the right, and measures 505 kilometers (314 miles across). Dione is further away at the top left, and measures 1,126 kilometers (700 miles across). This image was taken on October 15, 2005, when Cassini was 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Dione and 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Enceladus.

On December 11, NASA's Opportunity rover will join its partner Spirit to celebrate a full Martian year on the Red Planet. Both rovers will now have experienced all of the Martian seasons, and now they're nearing the end of the Martian summer. Opportunity is currently exploring exposed bedrock along a route between Endurance and Victoria craters, and recently found rock that seems to be younger than what it discovered inside Endurance crater. These rocks seem to be petrified sand dunes, and show a longer term cycle of wetness and dryness in the region.

Get a flat while riding a bike and you fix it, though you may never see the tack on the road that caused the puncture. However on the failure of a space mission, the whole aerospace industry might be left scratching their heads as to what happened and why. David Harland and Ralph Lorenz in their book Space Systems Failures lay down the known space failures before the reader in great detail and full disclosure. There's the occasional rescue of launcher payloads that slightly lighten this otherwise negative subject, but from the number and variety of faults they leave no doubt that space ventures are more a gamble than a certainty.

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! The Moon is back and tonight it will dance with Venus. Selene and the bright planets will grace this week's night skies as our observing year rapidly draws to a close. There will be plenty of lunar features to study, as well as some very colorful stars. As luck would have it, we have not one - but two - meteor showers to watch as well! Let's head out to explore, because...
Here's what's up!

Scientists from NASA and the National Science Foundation have created a new way to view the Earth's atmosphere during space storms. These large-scale storms resemble weather cold fronts that result from plumes of electrified plasma that flash across the Earth's ionosphere. These plumes used to seem like random events, but scientists have gotten pretty good at predicting them now, using a fleet of spacecraft. For the first time, they can now directly connect plasma observed in the atmosphere with these plumes that can extend thousands of kilometres into space.

Rick Stankiewicz took this picture of a contrail shadow on the 17th, October 2005.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

Gary Hatfield took this picture of Scutum Star Cloud from his place at Thaxton, VA.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

The rise of complex life on Earth matches the appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere, and new evidence from University of Maryland scientists suggests that the increase was more gradual than previously believed. According to microbial evidence, oxygen first appeared in our atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, and a second large increase started 1.3 billion years ago, and reached its current levels about 600 million years ago.

NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory has gathered 280 hours worth of data on the Perseus galaxy cluster to reveal massive amounts of turmoil in thousands of galaxies. Chandra discovered bright loops, ripples, and jet-like streaks. The supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy NGC 1275 (Perseus A) is creating low pressure plumes of gas extending out for 300,000 light-years.

When galaxies collide, it's a messy affair. Gas, dust and stars are often spun out into space and can form into satellite dwarf galaxies that continue to orbit their parent galaxies. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted a few dwarf galaxies in the process of formation around a recent merger in NGC 5291. Spitzer found that the dwarf galaxies are ablaze with star formation.

The Hubble Space Telescope took this amazing picture of the Crab Nebula supernova remnant. The star at the heart of the nebula exploded as a supernova nearly 1,000 years ago, and was recorded by Chinese astronomers as being bright enough to be visible during the day. This photograph was built up from 24 individual Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 exposures taken over several years.

When ESA's Huygens probe touched down on the surface of Titan earlier this year, it hit hard, and then slumped sideways into the soft ground. After analyzing the landing in detail, ESA scientists have calculated that Huygens probably hit a surface similar to soft clay, lightly packed snow, or wet or dry sand. It penetrated about 10mm into the ground, and then settled slightly over time by a few millimetres, tilting the probe a few degrees. It's possible that Huygens landed on a Titan beach, shortly after the hydrocarbon ocean tide went out.