Star-B-Q fever has hit Astronomy Ireland. Hundreds of you have already booked your tickets for Saturday's big event so we wanted to give you a preview of what will be on offer below. Thank you for supporting our annual fund-raiser and check out how you can save 10 or 20euro per ticket below if you're not already booked!

To help us promote astronomy we are asking you to get family and friends to come along from all over Ireland to the event, especially as the long range weather forecast for Saturday night is looking very promising. Met Eireann comments "Friday, Saturday and most of Sunday will continue dry and settled with high pressure continuing to dominate our weather". Other websites give very promising forecasts too.

A lot of you are interested in telescopes. We are delighted to announce that two members Martin Brady (Tipperary) and Paul Farquharson (Dublin) are bringing their Celestron CGE 1400 telescopes to Star-B-Q on Saturday. Worth about 10,000euro each, the CGE 1400 is Celestron's largest Schmidt-Cassegrain and collects over 2,500 times more light than the human eye. It comes on the top-of-the-range CGE mount, a professional engineered American-made mount with extremely high precision pointing accuracy that can find 40,000 objects from the built-in keypad and millions more when hooked up to a PC or laptop.

The views through the two "C14s" should be staggering, and will be complimented by the 21-inch (53cm) Millennium Telescope. Dozens of other powerful telescopes (all collect around 1,000 times, or more, light than the human eye) will at Star-B-Q for you to look through this Saturday (C8s, C9.25s, C11s etc). Thanks go to all our volunteers who are bringing them along to the event.

The 'star attraction' will be the planet Jupiter now well placed in the southern sky after sunset. We'll show you its moons and cloud belts in the powerful telescopes. And maybe even the asteroid Vesta near Jupiter just now!

The red planet Mars will also be on display. Mars will come closer to Earth this year than it will until 2016. Mars, is also the focus of Leo Enright's incredible 3-D lecture in the main hall to kick off Star-B-Q this year. Just think, after the presentation you can go outside and see the planet 'live' in the telescopes.

There's loads more to see and do, from the huge laser beam, the wonders of the universe, the food, the demos, binocular classes and more.

The ticket price for Star-B-Q will rise to 50euro on Saturday but you can save 10euro on an adult ticket (save 20euro for Under 16s) if you book in advance.

The 2007 Star-B-Q is going to be the biggest Star-B-Q ever, with more telescopes than ever being promised for the event. Plus it's the first to have a "key-note" speaker, Leo Enright.

So do not miss this Star-B-Q this Saturday and get along to our biggest annual national event no matter where you live in Ireland.

and please get everyone you know to come along for a night they will never forget (and help us raise funds to promote astronomy!).