Astronomy news to lift you skyward.

With all the doom and gloom going around, we need more good stories. So here are two about the heavens and the progress we're still making there.

First a story about the MESSENGER mission and it's new images of Mercury. Mercury is one of the closest objects to us yet is poorly understood because its nearness to the sun has made imaging of it difficult.

And yes, the that author described the spherical Mercury as "crescent shaped". It's not in the cited article at space.com yet both claim the same authorship. Someone needs to take said author to a bakery and explain the difference between a croissant and a doughnut hole.

Second is a story about COROT-Exo-3b. COROT-Exo-3b is firmly in the defined range of a brown dwarf star and would be the first observed body confirmed in that range. The curious bit is it's density, between iridium and uranium - an obscene density for a Jupiter-sized object. So it's potentially a monumental discovery for it's composition too. Either way, it's a neat discovery.