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...

I recently received a telephone call from a jazz musician, Michael Roach. He explained to me that he and the other members of the trio TEN27 have created seven original compositions inspired by astronomy and cosmology. As it turns out, a news article I wrote about the galaxy I Zwicky 18 for the February 2008 issue inspired one of their songs. The trio is holding an event this week called " The Black Book Project ." It is a multimedia-live...

India’s lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 finally blasted off last night. Make that one more space-faring nation on its way back to the Moon. One of Astronomy magazine’s columnists, James Oberg, sent the information below out to the various media interests he writes for and agreed to let me share it with you. In case you don’t know who Jim Oberg is, he is one of the world's leading popularizers and interpreters of space exploration. His classic Red Star...

Trillions of miles way, disks and gas and dust encircle baby stars just a few million years old. Rocky planetary cores form, then sweep through the disks, accreting additional material around themselves like a cardboard tube swirling through a carnival cotton-candy machine. As the protoplanets gain mass, they carve racetrack-like gaps in the gaseous disk. How do I know this? Dan Watson told me. He’s an astronomer at the University of Rochester in...