To predict exactly where you can see the northern lights is difficult as conditions can change quickly. The current ‘storm’ is said to be visible from northern England but they are notoriously difficult to predict. However, one thing is for sure, and that is that you are unlikely to see them from a brightly lit city environment – you need to go somewhere dark and look towards the northern horizon (look for the North Star). So, you would preferably be in the countryside away from street lights. Of course it also needs to clear!

Planetary alignments have always occurred; they are times when the planets in the solar system are all roughly positioned in the same direction when viewed from Earth. Given that we understand the orbits of the planets we can predict when these ‘alignments’ will occur. While the planets may look relatively close together in the sky they are of course separated by many millions of miles.

With NASA reporting technical issues with the Hubble Space Telescope's payload computer and starting procedures to switch to backup hardware, Professor Peter Wheatley from the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group in our Department of Physics comments on the importance of this 31 year old mission.

Today sees the launch of 36 new satellites that will form part of a network established by OneWeb that aims to offer a global internet service from space. Dr David Brown from the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group in our Department of Physics comments on the benefits this could bring, and some of the problems it poses.

"We need to take action to understand the debris population before the collision risk in certain orbits becomes significant – making them unusable." Professor Don Pollacco comments on the issues highlighted by the re-entry of a Chinese rocket launcher expected this weekend.