* Astronomy

Typhoon Nabi hit south-western Japan with torrential rains and high winds on Monday, cutting power supplies and disrupting transport and oil refineries.
The large scale of the storm and the low speed at which it was moving mean it would affect Japan for a relatively long time, possibly causing extensive damage.

Nabi was 180 km south of the tiny southern Japanese island of Yakushima at 0600 GMT (3pm local time). Winds were gusting up to 160 km an hour at the centre of the typhoon, but the storm was expected to weaken slightly as it passes over cooler water.

Nabi is classified as a Category 4 storm on an ascending scale of 1 to 5, the same category as Katrina, which hit the U.S. Gulf Coast last week.
Typhoon Nabi, whose name means "butterfly" in Korean, was travelling north-northwest at 15 km an hour, heading directly for the densely populated southern island of Kyushu.

The Meteorological Agency expects Nabi to swerve to the east over the next 24 hours, putting it on course to batter much of Japan and southern and eastern parts of South Korea.
Television pictures showed coastal areas of Amami Oshima being engulfed by waves that national broadcaster NHK said were up to 9 metres high.

Nabi has sparked thunderstorms in Tokyo, where more than 110 mm of rain fell in an hour in some areas late on Sunday. Thousands of households in or near Tokyo were flooded and lost power, while some highways were closed and trains delayed. Japanese oil refiners suspended waterborne operations at some of their facilities on Monday.

China's Anhui province took the brunt of the region's previous typhoon, Talim, with 53 people killed and 12 missing. Twenty-six more were killed in Zhejiang province, where Nabi was expected to make landfall.
In Jiangxi province, Talim killed five people, but the toll could rise with 15 people missing inside two buildings buried by a mudslide.