A TRIP to Pluto may seem a rather expensive way for dieters wanting to lose those unwanted pounds.

But an exhibition at Clitheroe's Castle Museum shows you can lose weight, as well as take years off your age, with a spot of space travel.

An 10-stone person would see their weight drop to just over half a stone - 8.2lb - if they decided to embark on a trip to Pluto because of the lack of gravity, and to around one-and-a-half stone while on the Moon (23lb).

But dieters beware. A stay on the largest planet Jupiter would see your weight balloon from 10 stone to around 23 stone - 330lb.

And anyone feeling their age can lose years by visiting some of the more distant planets, such as Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. A 27-year-old would become less than a year old when visiting any of these planets because a year - the time it takes them to travel around the sun - is such a long time.

The same person would see their years rise fourfold to 112 on a trip to Mercury, and 43 years on Venus.

Youngsters from all over the Ribble Valley visited the museum over the Bank Holiday museum to learn all about moon rock, meteorites and space travel from museum rock expert Hannah Chalk.

As well as having the chance to hold the rocks, collected by NASA, and look at them under the microscope, the children helped to paint their own planets for a museum wall display.

Hannah said: "The meteorites are like nothing we have seen on Earth and we are unsure as to what they are made up of. They are quite beautiful and I know of some that have been made into jewellery."

She said: "These youngsters have been very lucky to see these rocks. When they arrived I could not imagine what they would be like. Most of us will never visit the moon, so to see a piece of it is quite extraordinary and exciting for the children.

"These rocks are around four-and-a-half million years old and only 300kg has ever been brought back to earth by NASA, so that's a very small amount to be split between all the scientists in the world."

Valuable samples of moon rock and soil were brought back to earth by the Apollo astronauts. The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) is the only UK body which loans out samples.

Clitheroe mum Stella Brandolini-Whalley, who took her six-year-old daughter Angela along to the exhibition, said: "We came along last year to an exhibition on fossils and found it very interesting.

"Hannah is very good at talking to the children and both Angela an I have found it really interesting."

As well as the exhibition, which finished yesterday, lectures were also given the search for extra-terrestrial life, new earth asteroids and comets: friends or foe, and how the sun effects the earth.

Moon fact file:

- The first man on the moon was Neil Armstrong in 1969. - The moon is continuously moving away from the Earth. When formed, the moon was around 14,000 miles away, but the distance has now increased to around 280,000 miles.

Tides on Earth are caused by the Moon, with its gravity pulling the Earths oceans.

- The Moon is roughly a quarter of the diameter of Earth. Some scientists say it is more like a planet and call the Moon/Earth system a double planet.

- The Moon is not round, and is more egg-shaped. - The Moon's craters were made up from the intense pummelling by space rocks between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago.

- The Moon was created when a rock the size of Mars slammed into the Earth shortly after the creation of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago.