Video preview of Tim Peake’s spacewalk

Scientists are using photographs taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to reliably measure the amount of light pollution worldwide and to produce a global colour map of the Earth at night. The total cost of the energy consumption for streetlights is estimated by the study to be 6300 million euros/year in the European Union.

Have you ever seen the International Space Station (ISS)? It’s capable of exceeding Venus at its brightest and visible for up to 7 minutes as it crawls across the sky in an arc from west to east. Find out when and where to see some favourable passes of this 450-tonne, 109-metre-long spacecraft over the British Isles and Western Europe this week.

An instrument aboard the International Space Station has detected a binary star system made up of a fast-spinning pulsar and a compact white dwarf that orbit each other every 38 minutes, a record for an accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar.