Astronomy News

Life On Saturn's Moon Titan: Stand Well Back and Hold Your Nose! Research by astrobiologist William Bains suggests that if life has evolved on the frozen surface of Saturn's moon, Titan, it would be strange, smelly and explosive compared to life on Earth.

If life does exist on Saturn?s intriguing moon Titan, it probably stinks.

The icy moon has long been seen as a potential spot for extraterrestrial life, but so far, there?s no evidence of any living things there.

The more we look among the stars and galaxies, the weirder things seem to get. Even space itself is puzzling, for example. Recent studies suggest that the fabric of the universe stretches more than 150 billion light-years across -- in spite of the fact that the cosmos is 13.7 billion years old.

From super-fast stars to the nature of matter, here we cover other strange and mysterious elements of the universe.

Are We Alone, Really? The race to find intelligent life, or any life at all, beyond Earth has been a heated space scramble for decades. Even though no concrete evidence of extraterrestrials has ever been confirmed, it seems like every space probe ever launched and scheduled to launch has a "FIND LIFE" stamped in its mission.

That isn't to say we don't have our theories for where life might be hiding. Here, we take a look at some places we’ve explored, and some we haven't.

You may think it seems counter-intuitive to shoot landscapes once the sun has disappeared and light levels drop, but night sky photography actually has a special quality that brings a completely new dimension to your images.

The low-light conditions can present a challenge in terms of the practicalities of taking pictures, but much of this is a psychological aversion to shooting in the dark (which is actually a common photography problem).

Once these mental barriers are overcome, the rewards of night sky photography far outweigh any personal discomfort, opening up 
a whole host of new image-making opportunities.Lighting is clearly an issue when shooting night sky photography – there simply isn’t much of it, especially out in the countryside away from artificial light sources.

So how do you light your subject? One way is to use the light reflected from the moon. Under a fullish moon it’s possible to produce a fully illuminated landscape picture using a long exposure.

Moonlit images have a mystical, tranquil quality. The light is unlike that 
from the harsh rays of the sun, and the results are amazing. In a similar way that our eyes adjust to moonlight and allow us to see almost as well as in daylight, a camera is able to capture images illuminated solely by moonlight.

However, there is a big difference between daylight images and those taken using the much softer light from the moon. The way that light interacts with a scene to reveal shape and form looks very different when captured over a long exposure 
of ten, 20 or even 40 minutes.