Dear Astrophotographers,

Night sky brings us bright stars, mystery moon, and endless inspiration. Preparing for celebrating Yuri’s Night (April 12) as the huge step in space exploration Star Walk team wants to honor photographers who share our love for the beauty of the Universe. Join Star Walk Astrophotography Contest for a chance to see your work in Star Walk app Gallery.

How to enter the contest:

-  Post your astrophotography work on the wall of Star Walk Facebook page till April 9

- Add  #starwalk in the description

Winners:

- Winner of the week. Every Friday (March 14, March 21, March 28, April 4) we will pick up a winner of the week, whose work will be pinned to top of the page during the week and will be posted in Star Walk app Gallery (and that is 8 million users btw),

- Winner of the contest. On Yuri’s Night, April 12, we will announce the main winner. The final winner of the contest will receive $50 iTunes card or $50 promotion on the Star Walk page.

 Judges:

-Star Walk team

We’ve been conducting a survey online among the educators who use Solar Walk app. The main goal was to connect with the educators, to learn their personas, what grades they are teaching, what equipment they use, how they use it during the classes, what they think about the technology and to learn if they’re satisfied with the apps.

How:

- the users were asked to complete the survey straight from the app

- the survey was made with the help of SurveyMonkey online service

- the users were encouraged to do the survey with some free stuff

More than 12K of people took the survey among them 84% were men of the middle age and 76% of them were Educators.

68% were teachers of astronomy, astrophysics and physics. Most of them are teaching higher grades starting from 6th till 12K. There were also those who taught astronomy at Universities, schools, extra curricular sessions, and even from kindergartens.

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Check out this unusual crater on Mars. It’s not a very big one, less than 500 meters in diameter, and yet it has two rings. Most craters on Mars this size are simple bowl shapes. What’s going on here?

One possibility is that we’re looking at a nested pair of craters — one happening to strike dead center in the middle of another. But that doesn’t explain the otherwise flat floor of the larger crater, and requires quite a coincidence. Instead, it’s more likely we’re looking at a spot on Mars where the ground is layered. There’s an upper layer with different mechanical properties than the lower layer. To oversimplify, the upper layer is weaker than the lower layer, so the impactor can dig a bigger hole out of it.

Pretty pictures of terraced craters on Mars | The Planetary Society.

On 25 February 2007 at 02:15 GMT, Rosetta passed just 250 km from the surface of Mars. Rosetta’s Philae lander took this image 4 minutes before closest approach, at a distance of 1000 km. It captures one of Rosetta’s 14 m-long solar wings, set against the northern hemisphere of Mars, where details in the Mawrth Vallis region can be seen.

Mawrth Vallis is of particular interest to scientists because it contains minerals formed in the presence of water – a discovery made by ESA’s Mars Express.

This image was originally published in 2007 and was taken in black-and-white. Representative colour was added to the surface of Mars and, in this version, these colours have been slightly enhanced, along with some brightening of details in the solar wing.

On Sunday 2 March, Rosetta celebrates ten years since launch. The flyby at Mars was one of four planetary gravity assists (the other three were at Earth) needed to boost the spacecraft onto the correct trajectory to meet up with its target, comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, in August 2014.

Rosetta will become the first space mission to rendezvous with a comet, the first to attempt a landing, and the first to follow a comet as it swings around the Sun.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA

Recent scientific findings open new perspectives for the search for extraterrestrial life in the solar system. Studies of two new  “water “ cosmic bodies were published only a month apart. For now,  surface liquid water can only be found on the Earth; strips of wet sand sometimes appear on Mars; Saturn’s moon Enceladus has powerful geysers of ice ocean through cracks in the ice crust, and cryovolcanos on the neighboring Titan erupt with ice lava. Today the number of sites where you can “touch” the water have grown by Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the dwarf planet Ceres in the main asteroid belt.

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