Paul Lawston's Wild Space

Well, summer is nearly over and I’ve once again come to the conclusion that I’m not very good at keeping a regular blog! With the onset of autumn I need to make a renewed effort to explore and share the world around me, so consider this the first step… The summer of Covid-19 has been an unusual one, but there have also been a lot of opportunities for self-reflection, insight and discovery. I’m heartened by the number of people who have used this time as an opportunity to reconnect with their local area and the wildlife in it, even if a few people seem to have reconnected with their local open spaces by setting them on fire. Everyone has been trying to guess at what “The New Normal” will look like. I’m not going to do that because, as with everything around Covid-19, I don’t think anything is certain. I do have a lot of hope though that with a renewed interest in the natural world, more people will be spending time in nature, and hopefully doing so responsibly. So what have I discov...

Mercury is the forgotten naked eye planet because most people have never seen it. It’s one of the least explored worlds in our solar system but in the few times we have visited, we’ve found out that it’s not a place you'd want to live. We know it’s the closest planet to the sun and it orbits in 88 days while one rotation of the planet on its axis takes 59 days. That day would be quite uncomfortable though. At night the temperature plummets to below -150 o C but during the day it can reach well over 400 o C, which is hot enough to melt lead. There’s no atmosphere either – that got blown off by the fearsome solar winds, and without an atmosphere it has been constantly bombarded by meteors so its surface is heavily cratered. Mercury - Image from NASA Seeing Mercury is difficult, even though it shines brighter than most stars in the sky. Its proximity to the sun means that its light gets drowned out by the twilight glow but every so often it steps out far enough from our per...