A Saturday night out, 260 miles above London

French astrophotographer Thierry Legault travelled to the suburbs of Philadelphia, USA to capture both the International Space Station and planet Mercury transiting the Sun on 9 May. This image includes multiple stacked frames to show the Station’s path in the fraction of a second it took to cross the Sun, while Mercury appears as a black dot at bottom-centre.

Three crewmen from Russia, the United States and Great Britain blasted off toward the International Space Station on Tuesday, rocketing into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in pursuit of the orbiting research lab.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first publication of Albert Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. With interest in this topic piqued by the centennial, researchers from UK universities in Glasgow, Birmingham, and Cardiff will discuss their ongoing efforts to observe and measure cosmic gravitational waves for scientific research in London on Thursday, 11 February.