Videos made from actual New Horizons footage and digital models of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon are now on You Tube. (I got the steer from the Daily Galaxy.)

Pluto:-

Charon:-

A stunning picture of Saturn’s rings backlit by the sun from yesterday‘s Astronomy Picture of the Day. And between them the spot of light is Earth with the tiny pinprick to its left, the Moon.

This is a view that would have been difficult to imagine seeing when I was a lad.

Nasa’s Cassini probe has produced an intriguing close-up view of Saturn’s moon Pan.

This photograph is today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Pan orbits inside the the Encke Gap of Saturn’s A-ring but is an odd object indeed.

This is stunning. From Astronomy Picture of the Day, 1/2/2107.

A time-lapse video, taken over seven years, of Four Planets Orbiting Star HR 8799. (The system’s central star itself has been occluded to allow the planets to be seen.)

From Astronomy Picture of the Day 21/1/2017.

Saturn’s tiny moon Daphnis amid the wave striations and ring gap caused by its presence.

Another stunning picture from the Hubble Space Telescope via Astronomy Picture of the Day, 18/12/2016.

A stunning picture taken by the New Horizons probe of a backlit Pluto showing its hazy but stratified atmosphere appeared on Astronomy Picture of the Day on 9/6/16.

This NASA image made from assigning colours to three monochromatic photos taken through the Hubble Telescope was Astronomy Picture of the Day for 22/4/16.

It almost looks like a living cell of some sort.

Yet more fruit from NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft’s visit to Pluto.

An astounding video of Pluto’s moon Charon.

From Astronomy Picture of the Day via You Tube:-

Not only Astronomy Picture of the Day and the Daily Galaxy but also the BBC News majored today on the first detection of gravitational waves.

I first heard of such waves while I was still at University back in the long ago when a Physics Prof at Glasgow University came along to the Alchemists’ Club (as the post-grad Chemists association was called) to tell us all about his research, so it’s been a long time coming.

The discovery is a major confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity certainly but can it really be the opening of a new window onto the universe akin to Galileo’s pointing of a telescope at Jupiter as the TV news had it? Given that the signals are so hard to detect as a result of the disturbances to matter being so small surely the technique cannot become as routine as results from electromagnetic instruments are?