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When you hear someone say "Once in a Blue Moon…" you know what they mean: Rare. Seldom. Maybe even absurd. The month of May 2007 has two full moons, which means one of them is a "Blue Moon." But will it really be blue in color? Don't count on it.

This week's review contest winner takes a little Stellar Vue out for a spin with the top down.

The US space agency Nasa has unveiled a model of a space telescope that scientists say will be able to see to the farthest reaches of the Universe.

In its 17 years of exploring the heavens, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made nearly 800,000 observations and snapped nearly 500,000 images of more than 25,000 celestial objects. In its 17-year lifetime, the telescope has made nearly 100,000 trips around our planet, racking up about 2.4 billion miles. The 17 years' worth of observations has produced more than 30 terabytes of data, equal to about 25 percent of the information stored in the Library of Congress. Astronomers using Hubble data have published nearly 7,000 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built.

This week's review contest winner puts William Optics 110mm Zenithstar on stage...

According to observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes, SuperNova SN 2006gy is the brightest and most energetic stellar explosion ever recorded and may be a long-sought new type of explosion. The Chandra observation allowed astronomers to determine that SN 2006gy was indeed caused by the collapse of an extremely massive star, and not the most likely alternative explanation for the explosion, the destruction of a low-mass star.

NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) has just celebrated its fourth year in space with some of M81's "hottest" stars.

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Astronaut Walter M. "Wally" Schirra Jr., one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the only man to fly on all three of NASA's early space missions, has died, a NASA official confirmed Thursday. He was 84.

This week's review contest winner gets a feel for a small mount from the folks at Vixen.

New research shows that black holes are not the ultimate destroyers that they are often portrayed to be. Instead, hot gas escaping from the clutches of enormous black holes could be one source of the chemical elements (like carbon and oxygen) that make life possible.

In 1633, the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church "persuaded" Galileo Galilei to recant his ideas that the Earth moves around the Sun --taking a firm (but incorrect) stand on the Ptolemaic - Copernican controversy of the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1992, Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right. From the time of Galileo to the present day, the Vatican has changed dramatically in its views and in the last couple of hundred years has embraced and funded much serious astronomical research. Continuing in that tradition, today the Vatican operates the 1.83 meter Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) on Mount Graham in Arizona.

Using the European Southern Observatory (ESO) 3.6-m telescope in La Silla, Chile, a team of Swiss, French, and Portuguese astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date. The planet orbits a red dwarf star named Gliese 581. The planet lies in the habitable zone -- that is the region around a star where water could be liquid. The Earth-like planet's name is Gliese 581 c.

It's often said that 5" is the sweet spot for refractors. This week's review contest winner has a definite soft spot for Takahashi's latest achievement in apochromatic craftsmanship.

"The further on the edge, the hotter the intensity." Astronomers at the University of Arizona have mapped out planetary "danger zones," which are areas where winds and radiation from super hot stars can strip young, cooler stars (like our sun) of their planet-forming materials. Results show that cooler stars are safe as long as they lie beyond 1.6 light-years (or nearly 10 trillion miles) of these hot stars.

The product may not be the best thing since cheap apos but this week's winning review definitely defines the problems...