Space is big. Really big. In fact, it's so vastly, mindbogglingly big that the actual chance of an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier hitting anything is quite small. Peanuts, really. This Tuesday night, though, an asteroid will pass close by, without quite hitting, the earth. It will actually skip in closer than the Moon.

The Parkes Observatory opened on this day back in 1961 after ten years of planning and construction. 

Thanks to Aussie film The Dish, this radio telescope supplanted the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Siding Springs as the icon of antipodean space-watch hardware.

And that's not without some justification.

Pluto may not be a fully fledged planet, but at least it’s not the dwarfiest of dwarf planets. Its sibling, Eris, is not as large as astronomers thought, according to a new study. A rare stellar blockage event last year helped astronomers obtain some new measurements of the distant icy world, and they say it is quite dense and it may develop a feeble atmosphere as it moves closer to the sun.

There's a tonne of unexplained mysteries out there, and stellar phenomena that we can't explain using current scientific models, but a team of American astronomers have at least scratched one off the list - how a 2,000 year old supernova came to be quite as large as it is.

Not long after the discover of fifty new exoplanets by the European Southern Observatory in September, an Australian astronomer has helped capture the first ever images of an exoplanet being formed with the help of the Keck telescope in Hawaii.

Stargazers and night-owls alike; this is your opportunity to look to the skies as part of an international amateur astronomy event. All you have to do is find a centaur shooting an arrow with a teapot.