As 2008 draws to a close, we have completed another orbit around the sun. Late December is usually crammed with top 10 lists in many areas of entertainment and the general media. But I contend that unless you go digging around for one, you are not likely to be offered a list of notable scientific accomplishments. Here is my humble, and by no means complete, offering of the past year's best astronomy stories.

• In January, Alicia Soderberg, an astronomer at Princeton, was collecting data from the orbiting Swift X-ray telescope and serendipitously recorded the exact instant a star went supernova. "I truly won the astronomy lottery," Soderberg says.
•  Later in January, NASA's MESSENGER probe made a flyby of Mercury providing our best glimpse of the innermost planet since Mariner 10 way back in 1975.
• In March, scientists detected the brightest interstellar explosion to date — a gamma-ray burst some 7.5 billion light years distant that was briefly visible to the naked eye.
•  On May 25, NASA's Phoenix Lander touched down in the high latitudes of the Martian northern hemisphere. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a shot of Phoenix and its parachute as it made its descent through the Martian atmosphere. The historic picture marks the first time one spacecraft has imaged another spacecraft landing on another planet. Phoenix performed wet chemistry experiments that conclusively proved the presence of subsurface water ice in Martian tundra soils.
• Citizen science took a great leap with two campaigns to measure the impact of light pollution on our night skies and the discovery of a mystery object in deep space images by a Dutch schoolteacher participating in the Galaxy Zoo project.
• But the most stunning discovery is perhaps the first direct image of an exoplanet orbiting a star named Fomalhaut. The host star and its planet are about 25 light years distant in the direction of the constellation Pisces Austrinus.
  

Certainly, there will be many discoveries in the New Year, but the change of the calendar to 2009 also ushers in the International Year of Astronomy and the 400th anniversary of Galileo's use of a telescope to explore the night sky.

The program is a worldwide effort by the International Astronomical Union and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to promote interest in astronomy and science through outreach and public education under the theme "The Universe, Yours to Discover." Special events and activities will be hosted by local museums, science centers and astronomy clubs in an effort to inspire the minds of young and old alike and heighten awareness our place in the universe.

You don't have to wait until 2009 to begin your journey of wonder and discovery. Tonight, look to the west and enjoy a beautiful conjunction of the two brightest objects in the evening sky — the crescent moon and Venus.

Peter Lipscomb is director of the Night Sky Program for the New Mexico Heritage Preservation Alliance. Contact him at plipscomb@nmheritage.org.