The Pope may not yet have settled on a patron saint of the internet (suggestions have ranged from the Archangel Gabriel, bearer of messages, to Saint Rita of Cascia, patron saint of impossible causes), but that doesn't mean our heavens are closed to the web.
Quite the reverse: it has never been easier to watch the skies. Anyone on the internet can now register at www.telescope.org to ask the Bradford Robotic Telescope, high on the moors in West Yorkshire, to look at anything in the northern night sky, and you can then view the image on your PC.
It's a busy link, so if you have trouble getting through, Eyes on the Skies, a Robotic Solar Observatory in Livermore California, lets you control its solar telescopes using a simple web interface. The service is only available during the California day time. (It has to be sunny too, they say.) The site also has a good library of images of solar flares.
Jodrell Bank in Manchester, home of the famous 76m Lovell radio-telescope (the fourth largest in the world) has a webcam: the main telescope is in the parked position being refurbished, but you can follow the restructuring work at www.jb.man.ac.uk/webcam.
If you have your own telescope, Jodrell also maintains a regular guide to the night sky, pinpointing astronomical events to look out for each month at www.jb.man.ac.uk/public/nightsky.html . Can't wait? Earthsky will tell you what to look at now. For a list of online observatories and astronomy resources, visit www.astromart.com/links.asp?c=3.
For real star-gazers, the US National Radio and Optical Observatories maintain in-depth sites including image galleries at www.nrao.edu and www.noao.edu respectively. And if you are new to astronomy, www.theskyguide.com has a beginner's guide to the night sky.
If you don't have your own telescope, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) at www.seds.org/images maintain an ongoing database of the latest images, including startling photographs from the Hubble space telescope.
As you might expect, Nasa has a whole third-world country's budget worth of sites that might help you save $20 million and still catch the view from space. You can also watch video feeds from Space Shuttle missions: see www.ambitweb.com/nasacams ntvsched.html for a schedule. To while away time until the next mission, you can even watch Nasa-TV (16 channels of it!) at www.ambitweb.com/nasacams/nasacams.html.
Fancy the real thing? You might have to wait a bit. We are probably never going to get to wage war with the red planet - the evidence suggests Mars only ever sustained minute bacterial life, which died out without our help - but it looks as though we will be going over there to check soon.
The unmanned probe Surveyor 2001 will arrive over Mars on October 24, cruising at an altitude of 160,00 feet; you can get a window seat at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/2001/orbiter/orbiter_home.html. You will have to provide your own light refreshments.
If you fancy launching a mission yourself, or simply want to peep at the god of war from over here on the blue planet, Nasa maintains a Mars Today page showing current conditions on Mars, and its present position in relation to earth. Information on future manned missions can be found at http:// spaceflight. nasa.gov/mars. And once we do make it over there in person, www.geocities.com/marsterraforming has some advice on how to make it nice.
But what if someone else has already settled in? The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project, where you can sign up to share your computer-time to decode ET signals from the stars, has recently introduced fraud detection, so no fun there, although you can still help them scan the sky for bug-eyed soap-operas at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu.
If there is someone out there, at least they will have been forewarned. The Voyager Golden Record, sent out in 1977, was a small gold disk that contained everything the 70s thought the universe should know about us. Find out what the ETs might have already seen - and heard - at http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/record.html.
And if simply watching does not satisfy you, www. solarsystem.f2s.com goes on a virtual tour of the solar system. Or grab your backpack, pick up a ticket at http://library.thinkquest.org/28327/?tqskip=1 and trek round the whole Universe.
Why not prepare for your trip with the real Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, at www.h2g2.com?
Here, despite the recent sad demise of Douglas Adams, you can read and contribute to its comprehensive library of information, on such galactic features as St Pancras station and the Hangar-Lane gyratory.
It is a small universe.
