Tour guide to the moon

The best discoveries, inventions and surprises

Ten years ago, Pluto emerged from the gloom at the Solar System’s ragged edge – and a new world came in from the cold. Five billion kilometres (3 billion miles) from Earth, on 14 July 2015, NASA’s pia

The prospect of life on Mars – Earth’s planetary next-door neighbour, an alien world that betrays tantalising hints of a watery past – has bewitched humanity for centuries. From the ‘canals’ seen by a

The Moon has a diameter of around a quarter that of Earth and travels around our planet in a circular orbit roughly every 27 days. But Earth also possesses a number of tiny co-orbital bodies – objects

BEST TIME TO SEE: Nights of 9/10, 10/11 and 11/12 July A full Moon occurs when the Moon is opposite the Sun in the sky or, in other words, when its ecliptic longitude is 180° from the Sun. The eclipti

Scientists distinguish between weight and mass, which may seem pedantic until you see what happens on a world where gravity is radically different to Earth’s