ALTHOUGH Venus is still blazing in the west after sunset, and Saturn shines throughout the night like a golden star, March has no dramatic celestial events to enjoy, so it's good we can look back on a great lunar eclipse on March 3. Did you see it? I know at least 60 of you did, because that's how many people hiked up the hill to Kendal Castle on the night, to attend the Eddington Astronomical Society's Eclipse Watch'. The weather was perfect, and at totality', when the Moon was fully bathed in Earth's shadow, the Moon took on a reddy-brown colour. And with beautiful turquoise-blue shades at the top, the view through our scopes was quite spectacular. If you missed the eclipse there is another one visible for us in February next year, or you can travel to the US in August this year to see one there if you can't wait that long...

Many people watching the eclipse commented that they had never seen The Man in The Moon' so clearly before. That was probably because they'd never actually looked at the Moon so closely or so long before. Of course there's not really a Man in The Moon, that's just the name we give to the dark areas visible on the Moon's bright face when it is full. Although those dark patches are known as seas, they're not seas of water, but vast plains of now frozen lava, leftover from when the Moon was struck so hard in places by asteroids that its surface cracked open like eggshell, and molten rock gushed out, flooding across the surface. The more imaginative of us join these dark splotches into the pattern of a face hence the famous "Man". If you haven't seen him before, try on April 2 when the Moon is full again. Binoculars will help you see him Actually, we do this a lot, see patterns, especially faces, where there really aren't any. It's human nature. How many times have you thought that you've seen a face in the clouds above you, or in the flames of a flickering fire? Well, this has happened many times out there in space too. Many of the constellations represent human figures - such as mighty, belted Orion, still visible in the southern sky on these warming March evenings - and there are countless examples of people seeing faces in astronomical images, both on the surfaces of planets and out in the frothy star clouds of deep space. The most famous is the Face On Mars', spotted in '76 by one of the Viking probes, which many people - adding two and two to get 50 - saw as proof that there was once an ancient civilisation on Mars that had built an enormous face-shaped statue Sadly, the face is just a small hill with ridges and hollows that, when shadowed, look like eyes, a nose and mouth. And when Mars reappears in the evening sky later this year, not even the most powerful telescopes will be able to see any face' on its ruddy, cratered surface.

But space is full of faces. If you know where to look - or if you Google them on t'internet - you can see the Witch Head Nebula', The Eskimo Nebula', The Clown Nebula' and many more. I'm now shamelessly adding to that list The Amber Nebula', named after a beautiful dog that left us a month ago, and is sorely missed.