I thought this was a lovely picture of Mars, a moonbow and a rather magical earthly landscape. We are apparently seeing a layer of clouds or maybe fog hugging mountaintops. Above the clouds or fog, the night is crystal clear, and Mars shines redly on the scene. To the upper right of Mars, you can see a small star cluster, M44 or the Beehive Cluster. Still more fascinating is the colorful moonbow, created as moonlight is reflected in the tiny water drops of fog. I think it's rather magical, too, to see a photo of a rainbow - correction, a moonbow - whose highest point appears to be pretty much level with your eyes.

Red Mars and colorful moonbow

Ann

That's lovely. Did you see this Hubble picture of an asteroid collision ?

There's also a very sad little cartoon about the Spirit Mars Rover here.

We've just found our 6" reflector at work - it vanished when our refurbishment began in June last year, and just turned up in a store room full of files. Someone has unfortunately damaged the tripod, but hopefully the alignment motors are still OK and we will be able to use it once the weather clears a little - not that it's a huge amount of use in the middle of London, there's just too much light pollution, but some of the brighter classes might be allowed to take it to some better locations during field trips etc.

Yes, that was Wednesday's Astronomy Picture of the Day. (Poor asteroid, it was Wednesday's child!)

The caption to the APOD picture says that two asteroids may have smashed into one another at more than 15,000 kilometers an hour, more than five times the speed of a rifle bullet. That is some head-on collision! The bulls-eye would have released more energy than a nuclear bomb. What we see is the 140 meter nucleus of one of the bodies involved in the collision, plus an enormous tail of debris.

Ann