Now that the August 2009 issue of Astronomy is in the mail or already in hand, we’ve updated Astronomy.com with our newest web extras to give subscribers exclusive complementary information to this special issue about our return to the Moon. Take a sneak peek inside the August 2009 Astronomy magazine . If you subscribe to Astronomy , make sure you’re registered with Astronomy.com so you can access these great extras. Here are this issue's highlights...

If all goes as planned, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will launch from Cape Canaveral either Thursday or Friday, depending on the launch of space shuttle Endeavour. Brown University professor and LRO researcher Michael Wyatt is at the launch site, and starting today, Wyatt will share his impressions of this historic mission — the opening maneuver in the United States return to the Moon — with all of you. Thanks, Michael! We'll post Michael's...

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Exploration Program web site has a fun new feature — Ask Dr. C, “your personal Mars expert.” You can type in a simple question — the simpler, the better — and get a pretty good answer. A computer program tries to match your question with an extensive database of responses. The real Dr. C is Phil Christensen , a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. Christensen is the Principal Investigator for the 2001...

Astronomers eagerly anticipate the final Hubble Space Telescope (HST) servicing mission, set to blast off May 12 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And they are already hard at work designing the observatory that will take over after Hubble sees its final light. Hubble is, in the lingo of telescope engineering, a UVOIR instrument: Its 2.4-meter light-collecting mirror samples wavelengths of light in the ultraviolet (UV), optical (O)...

Last summer, my colleague Michael Bakich, a senior editor at Astronomy , kindly gave me a special filter that fits on the front of my 4-inch Celestron NexStar, thus allowing me to observe the Sun without turning my eyeball into a poached egg. I looked at the Sun with the new setup. Nada. Nothing! Thanks to this cool graphic just released by NASA, it’s clear why the Sun is so, well, boring to look at lately. We are in a deep “solar minimum,” a period...

OK, April Fool’s Day is over. Some pretty clever pranks bounced around the Net yesterday, including a rumor that Admiral Adama of Battlestar Galactica fame is being considered for the post of NASA administrator. And then there was the one about the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and Pluto. This tidbit apparently originated on the internal computer system of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "Based on new observational evidence of more...

Megacorps are practically lining up for the privilege of disseminating fantastic volumes of astronomical images to you, John and Jane Q. Public. Recently Google added a “Live from Mars” function to its 3-D visualization of Mars within Google Earth. The feature allows you to see images from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Now Microsoft says it will let you explore images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, pictured at right) within its web-based...

Richard Greenberg, a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is an expert in celestial mechanics and carries out NASA-sponsored investigations of solar system evolution and planet formation. He is also author of the current book Unmasking Europa . After NASA and the European Space Agency chose Jupiter’s moons — including Europa — as the next destination for a major planetary exploration mission...

“There is an ocean beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa [pictured at right]. Strange creatures could be swimming in these alien waters, but so far no missions have been sent there to investigate this possibility.” So begins, " Hoping for Europa ," an article by Astrobiology magazine Editor Leslie Mullen. Squids from outer space — who could resist? Or will it be a balloon ride over the windblown surface of a hydrocarbon lake on...

You have probably heard that Google and NASA have finally released the Google Mars update for Google Earth. I finally got the time to install Google Earth 5.0 and play on the surface of Mars for a bit this morning. It’s amazing. I first heard about this project a couple of years ago after stumbling across a subculture of Google Earth devotees who were overlaying pieces of Mars on Google Earth to create simulated 3D views. It was, as they say, a “hack...