An Australian amateur astronomer, Mr Michael Sidonio, 43, is a very happy man this week after winning a science photography competition with this picture entitled, ‘A Kaleidoscope of Dust and Gas in Orion’.

Mr Sidonio drove deep into the countryside of New South Wales, Australia, to escape the lights of big cities, and trained his camera into the clear night sky. Using a very slow exposure of 12.5 hours, he managed to reveal the beautiful swirling mass of stars, dust and gas that make up the Sword of Orion, situated 1500 light years away.

This formation is known as a "stellar nursery" because it is where thousands of new stars are born, and the explosion of colours are normally invisible to the naked eye. Ultra violet radiation emitted deep inside by the stars produce the red hues, and the blue-grey areas are formed from huge clouds of fine dust particles.

New images taken by the long exposure Hubble Space Telescope have recently been released showing a spiral galaxy, known as NGC4911, which lies more than 320 million miles away from Earth – and what a thing of beauty it is!
The distant galaxy contains rich lanes of dust and gas near its centre, silhouetted against newborn star clusters and shimmering pink clouds of hydrogen indicating ongoing star formation.

The high resolution of Hubble’s cameras, together with an incredibly long exposure time of 28 hours, has also captured the outer spiral arms of NGC4911, along with many thousands of other galaxies of differing proportions.

The Hubble Space Telescope, named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, was put into orbit back in 1990 and has been transmitting some breathtaking pictures ever since. It is expected to continue functioning until at least 2014, after which time it will be replaced by its ‘successor’, the James Webb Space Telescope.

If you have a spare few minutes then go and take a look at the Hubble website and browse through the huge gallery of images captured thus far – it really is a miracle of technology to be able to see such magnificent images from so far away.

Website address:     http://hubblesite.org/

Encouraged by the success of two recent space missions, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is set to launch a further mission to Mercury in 2014 using a spacecraft covered in mirrors - the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO).

The theory goes that the mirrors will help reflect the intense heat of the sun, with the mirrors remaining at a temperature of about 160C (320F), and the inner body of the craft holding the observation equipment being kept to below 60C (140F) – hopefully enabling the MMO to survive. 

The craft will stand around 6ft high and will be powered in part by solar energy collected by panels wrapped around a main body that will constantly rotate to prevent any one side becoming too hot.

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun although not the hottest. Because of its proximity to the sun it lacks an atmosphere as this was 'burned off' long ago,  leaving an empty wasteland of rock with a similar surface to the Earth’s moon. There is nothing to hold in solar radiation and so it just flies out into space. 

Next planet along Venus, however, is a different story altogether. The atmosphere there is mainly composed of carbon dioxide (the primary green house gas) which acts like a one-way door for the solar heat - solar heat enters, but cannot leave again and thus, an oven is created.  

When visiting Poland in 2008 as part of a link I have with the Medical University of Warsaw, I couldn’t help but take some time out to go and visit the Nicolaus Copernicus monument outside the headquarters of the Polish Academy of Sciences at the Staszic Palace.

Having had a love of astronomy since childhood, I remember from an early age reading about Copernicus, the 16th century father of modern astrology. His pioneering work ‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium’ (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres) suggested that the Earth rotated on its axis once a day and travelled around the sun once a year. This shocked people, and more especially the Church at the time as the idea that the Sun was in fact the centre of the universe and not the Earth was unthinkable!  The Church declared him to be a heretic and banned his book in 1616, some years after his death in 1543.

At the time of his death, the body of Copernicus was put into an unmarked tomb in the cathedral of his hometown of Frombork, Poland and there it lay for centuries until it was finally located after a long search, in 2005. The remains were positively identified by DNA testing in 2008, by comparing the bones and a tooth from the remains, to two strands of his hair found in a book that Copernicus once owned. 

And so, this Saturday the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus were once more laid to rest as his coffin was entombed in the 14th century cathedral of Frombork, his northern Polish hometown, and his grave marked by a black granite headstone engraved, quite aptly, with a map of the solar system.

Rest in Peace Nicolaus Copernicus.