It’s been a spectacular week for the film space industry, and here at Starts With A Bang!, we’ve got the recap of all the highlights that you may have missed while watching the countless Oscar montages. Take your time browsing and enjoying this site, and maybe even find out what the question is if 42 is the answer! And now, without further ado, here are the winners from the 43rd Carnival of Space, as chosen by Ethan Siegel, your magnanimous host of this week’s Carnival (and check out all previous carnivals here):

• Nancy Young-Houser, of A Mars Odyssey, for Stellar Breakthrough Performance for her work on The Mysterious Solar Flares.
• Will Gater, for Best Adaptation of An Epic Poem for Odyssey’s End In Sight For Ulysses. The Odyssey took 17 years this time; up 7 from last time.
• David Bigwood, for Comeback Performance of the Year for What’s New and Noteworthy at the Lunar & Planetary Institute. The great highlight here is, of course, an entire free issue of their new magazine, Communicating Astronomy with the Public.
• Amanda Bauer, aka Astropixie, wins an award far greater than Oscar gold and has a job offer in Europe, where she’ll be moving in the fall. Enjoy Nottingham, Amanda, and congratulations! She brings us a recap of 50 years of Space Science, and shares her opinions of what the next 50 years may bring, including an interesting opinion on the Moon-Mars initiative.
• Robert Simpson at Orbiting Frog, for Best Animated Feature for his work on locating and tracking many of Earth’s man-made satellites, using Google Earth/Sky. Anyone want to add Sputnik?

• Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams for best Director, as he directs you to the quest to find terrestrial (rocky) planets in the Centauri star system. He’s got links and references to the hard science that it’s based on, too.
• Bruce Irving at Music of the Spheres, for Outstanding Technical Achievement for his post Bravado and Robots, about the robots that may explore underground and undersea environments on other planets.
• Keeping with Robots, Brian Wang of Next Big Future wins for Outstanding Subterranean Achievement for his article about a new lunar truck and mining rover.
• Bill Dunford, of Riding with Robots, wins for best Poem (bet you didn’t know that category!) for his entry on chain poems about space. The latest chain poem is for the scientists working on the Japanese Kaguya mission, and some of it is really interesting!
• Robert Nemiroff from Astronomy Picture Of the Day wins Best Picture (duh) for this stunning picture of the Lunar Eclipse. Damn you, Arizona skies; I was clouded out after just seeing a little bit of the first part of it! There goes the Earth’s shadow… we won’t see it again until 2010.

• David Portree at Altair VI wins for Best Adapted Screenplay for his play about Galileo and his daughter. He also brings us a little bit of NASA’s Mars exploration history that you might not know about.
• The Astroprof wins the award for Planetary Alignment for talking about planetary conjunctions and occultations.
• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society wins for Best Foreign Film for the Contribution of Mars Global Surveyor (R.I.P. 2006) to the mysterious White Rock Formation in Mars’ Pollack Crater. Hey, if Ed Harris didn’t win for his role Jackson Pollack, maybe this win for Pollack Crater will redeem that?
• Pamela Gay, A.K.A. Star Stryder, wins for Biggest Burst, for her post on Star Formation in the Center of the Galaxy. Big central bulge + huge density of stars + lots of gas & dust = star formation! She’s got the details, and the scientific papers to boot!
• Captain Kirk William Shatner for Best Actor (ha!) for his cameo appearance with Mars HiRISE images at Cumbrian Sky. Shatner was negotiating priceline rates at the time, so Stuart Atkinson will be accepting the award on his behalf.

• Robert Pearlman of collectSPACE wins for Improvements in Safety for his article on NASA’s display of the debris of Space Shuttle Columbia. There’s a lot that we’ve learned since then about ensuring that another disaster like that doesn’t occur.
• The Fool at New Frontiers wins for best Science Fiction Screenplay for his update on Spaceport America. This isn’t fiction, of course, but will it actually succeed? Nobody knows…
• Darnell over at Colony Worlds wins the Meteorology Oscar for his forecasts of radiation storms with SOHO. This is even better than the Dr. G/Mr. G weatherman scandal I had growing up in New York!
• The Bad Astronomer wins the Tom Cruise award for his post on the panspermia hypothesis. Was life created from non-life on Earth, or did it happen somewhere else and wind up here? (I had a recent post on this, but I like Phil’s take on it, too.)

• Shubber at Space Cynic wins for Achievements in Special Effects for the possible impending doom of NASA’s Ares mission. If Shubber is right, I would be hard-pressed to find an informed astronaut willing to get on board that thing!
• Sean Welton wins the award for rehashing the oldest fight in Astronomy, between Newton and Galileo, over whether you should own a refracting telescope or a reflecting telescope. My money’s on Newton’s reflectors; dude, the man wrote a book called “Opticks.”
• Ethan Siegel wins the Shameless Self-Promotion Cosmic History award for his post right here on Starts With A Bang! on why the Cosmic Microwave Background is the same temperature everywhere. He narrowly defeated a competing post on figuring out the Age and Size of the Universe, which would have won any other week.
• Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay win for Best Broadcast for their Podcast at Astronomycast.com on “Where is the center of the Universe?” Apparently, it isn’t wherever I happen to be, contrary to whatever I may tell you.
• Finally, Nancy Young-Houser won her second award of the night, The Humanitarian Award, for her post on NASA unveiling Space for the Blind. It’s written by the same author who wrote the 1990 Braille book Touch the Stars.

Made it this far? Take a good look around the site and enjoy! Have any questions about astronomy/physics/cosmology? Drop me a line and check back; it’s your good questions that keep me writing. Thanks for visiting this week’s Carnival of Space! Did you like it? Digg it!