2007 Review Year end is the time to look back and WOW! what a year 2007 turned out to be. This seems to have been the year of the comet – starting in January with the amazing Comet McNaught the brightest in 45 years. Further comets followed in April, July and October. The most surprising event of 2007 has to be the spectacular outburst of an obscure comet named 14P Holmes on October 24^th. It grew to be the biggest object in the solar system and at the end of the year was still visible. The final comet of 2007 was 8P Tuttle which reached 6^th mag by year end. Lunar events included a beautiful total eclipse in March and two lunar occultations of Saturn and one of Venus. Though there were fewer Noctilucent Cloud displays than last year, at the end July we had a wonderful electric-blue display just before dawn. Solar activity has been very low since solar minimum, but we still had two appealing low-level aurora displays in September and December. All of the annual meteor showers put on good displays, plus two rare outburst of the Aurigids (September) and Ursids (December). There were some great spaceflight highlights too in this the anniversary year of the first man-made satellite – Sputnik. In June the space shuttle Atlantis on the STS 117 mission was visible just after launch and in December an Atlas 5 rocket producing a comet like cloud after dumping excess fuel. The GAC was invited to the launch of the Dark Sky Scotland project in Edinburgh and took part in two Forestry Commission events in February and November. For many people in the UK 2007 will one of too much wet weather, but here in Galloway we enjoyed very good weather both through the day and more importantly at night. 2008 has its highlights so click HERE to see the Future Events page