Beyond Planet Earth

A Hawaiian-Style Volcano on Io New images from Galileo reveal unexpected details of the Prometheus volcano on Io including a caldera and lava flowing through fields of sulfur dioxide snow. November 5, 1999: A volcanic crater several times larger than one found at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano has been photographed on Jupiter's moon Io during a close flyby performed by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. "It appears that the Prometheus volcano on Io has characteristics remarkably similar to those of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, although Prometheus is much larger," said Dr. Laszlo Keszthelyi (KEST-ay), a Galileo research associate at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. "Both volcanoes are long- lived eruptions, with flows that apparently travel through lava tubes and produce plumes when they interact with cooler materials."

For the above photo, the caption: Right: This is a high-resolution image of part of Prometheus, an active volcano on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io. In earlier, lower resolution images, it appeared that all the dark material at Prometheus comprised a single, long lava flow. The new image shows for the first time that the northeastern end of this dark feature is actually a lava-filled caldera 28 kilometers (17 miles) long and 14 kilometers (9 mile s) wide. The underground source of the Prometheus lava is probably beneath this newly discovered caldera. Galileo scientists are intrigued also by the snowfield containing hummocks, seen to the east of the Prometheus caldera.

LEONID METEOR SHOWER Leonids in the Crystal Ball -- On the morning of November 18, 1999, bits and pieces of periodic comet Tempel-Tuttle will hurtle into Earth's atmosphere at a head-spinning 158,000 mph. There is little danger - few of the meteoroids will reach the ground. Most will disintegrate and in the process produce a streak of light in the sky called a meteor. The meteors caused by debris from comet Tempel-Tuttle are known as Leonids because they appear to come from the direction of the constellation Leo. Most years the November Leonids aren't much to write home about. Observers see no more than 10 to 15 meteors per hour. But every 33 years something special happens. Comet Tempel-Tuttle swings through the inner solar system bringing with it an especially dense cloud of debris. The last time this happened was in January 1998, and the November 1998 Leonids were spectacular. Experts think that this year's Leonids be even better, with peak rates greater than 1000 shooting stars every hour. The place to be on November 18, 1999 is certainly outside and looking up! For the next two weeks, Thursday's Classroom will present lesson plans about meteor showers and the Leonids. We'll also be inviting kids to participate in real NASA research by counting meteors. http://www.thursdaysclassroom.com/index_28oct99.html

The last time a "star shower" was predicted everybody in and around Lisbon went out of town to watch the skies. They were in for a big time disappointment. That was more than three years ago but I'm not sure when (I still lived in my old apartment and stayed up late to watch from my window). So now the papers are being very cautious about the Leonids. They say it "might" be worthwhile to watch for them ;-)

Meteors and comets are such difficult things to predict. No one knows what has happened since the last swing around the sun, and sometimes, they just disappear into the sun and are never seen again. Maggie just sent this URL for Live Cam broadcast of the Leonids http://www.live-leonids.org/en/live.html

The Broadcast begins in 10 minutes - at 5 pm Austin time.

we're supposed to see some of a meteor shower tonight at 8 central time. i had just about forgotten!

Now you know! Put a sticky-note on the bridge of your nose so you do not forget *grin*

As I interpret the information: The Tempel-Tuttle comet comes by every November. Every 33 years it comes close enough to break into our atmosphere. It permanently fires off meteoroids everywhere it goes all the time. Is that right? Would it be orbiting around the sun? I am such a dunce astronomically - someone hold my hand.

This is correct. Anything orbiting in the solar system ultimately orbits the sun. It is a periodic comet which means it has returned at predictable times since its initial discovery. Haley's Comet is the most famous of these return visitors with a period of 75 years. On occasion Comets slam into the sun as their orbits decay and the sun's gravity draws them into itself. All that is left of the Temple-Tuttle Comet is meteor showers which follow the former comet's orbital path. Eventually, they too wi l fall victim to gravity and be no more.

(Since you are not using your hand for Cricket at this time of the year, I would be delighted to hold it, astronomically and virtually!)

Wasted getting up at 2 a.m. skies cloudy couldn't see anything. Am I right in that the leonids are an annual event associated with the temple-tuttle comet? Is it possible there will be further showers tonight? We do have a clear sky now - typical!

Yes, there will be more tonight...but supposedly last night was the best viewing. I had the same result as you did in the middle of the night. Clouds! (Hot and sunny here, as well!) I plan to look tonight again...hope springs eternal and all that...!

On Response 11 to MarkG I noted that it was debris from the Temple-Tuttle comet.

Please check Geo 15.26 and 15.27...the volcanoes on Io are shown in photographs and the caption which goes with them are there. http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/restricted/read/Geo/15.26

i sat out for 20 minutes and saw one flare through the sky. i was lucky to see that one because there weren't anymore visible from my backyard.

Somewhere they counted 5,000 per hour. Bummer! I saw none, of course. All that blessing and dust control which makes our orchids so lovely obscures my skies most nights. Good for you to see that one! Did your kiddies see it, as well?

Friday, December 3 NASA and its various websites listed below will carry live from Mars the Polar Lander beamed to Earth from 157 million miles away. The sites will contain weather reports, science data, first sound clips ever beamed to Earth from "out there" and lots of pictures. Main Mars site will post the latest pictures and updates throughout the 90-day mission: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98 JPL's main page has links to the latest Mars project as well as to probes sent to other planets over the last 20 years: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov JPL's Mars Educational site which includes activites for children and teachers: http://marsnt3.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.html UCLA, where the primary science team is based, offers a site focusing on the experiments aboard the Mars Volitiles and Climate Surveyor payload. http://mars.ucla.edu

The first link (jpl.nasa.gov/msp98) does not work...try http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98 or http://marslander.jpl.nasa.gov

Got through to the site OK. Pictures taking a while to download. Will check back again tomorrow as it's getting late here. Looks exciting. Thanks for bringing it to my attention Marcia!!

Tomorrow will be early enough...JPL are having problems contacting the little dear now that it is on the surface. There are just so few windows of opportunity when Mars is accessible from Earth, and most of those have been used for today. Tomorrow will be a good time to check. It will be slow-going until the weekend begins because all of the schools in America as well as the rest of the world are trying to access the sites, too. It is difficult to be patient...

Friday - 18:54 12/03/99, EST Mars Lander Misses First Communications Chance PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - Scientists plotting the planned touchdown of the Mars Polar Lander were met with a frustrating silence on Friday after failing to receive the first expected signal from the spacecraft that would indicate that it had landed safely on the Martian surface. Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena scanned the skies for contact from the lander, which had been due at roughly 12:39 p.m. PST (3:39 p.m. EST), or 24 minutes after its scheduled landing on Mars. After about 20 minutes, however, flight operations manager Sam Thurman told engineers to take a break and wait for the next possible communications window, expected after 2:04 p.m. PST (5:04 p.m. EST). Scientists speculated that the spacecraft may have gone into a ``safe'' mode and had not deployed its main antenna properly after landing. They said another possibility was that it was transmitting, but on an unknown frequency that would take NASA's Deep Space Network of worldwide listening posts some time to locate. If everything had gone according to plan, the lander would have deployed its main antenna and started sending back communications to Earth, informing controllers that it had started its mission to search Mars for signs of water and other information about its climate. Scientists long had cautioned that it was very possible that no communications link would be established during the first window of opportunity, and said there were numerous chances later on Friday and over the rest of the weekend for the lander to open communications links with Earth.

Now seems a bit dismal. News at teatime (GMT) was that todays window had passed and hope was fading. Nice pictures on the site though!

Still No Sign of Life From Mars Lander PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - Space controllers on Sunday failed for a fifth time in 48 hours to make contact with the Mars Polar Lander since it arrived on the Red Planet, causing bitter disappointment among the scientists and raising fears about the mission. ``I'm not pessimistic. But I'm disappointed. I feel like I've been stood up on a date. This is not a good thing,'' Dave Crisp, a mission scientist, told reporters minutes after the latest attempt failed. The $165 million lander was supposed to use its Ultra High Frequency antenna to make contact with the Mars Global Surveyor satellite orbiting the planet during a brief, six-minute communications window, but it remained silent, as it has since Friday, when it was scheduled to land on Mars at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT). The window of opportunity stretched from 10:50 a.m. PST (1:50 p.m. EST/1850 GMT) to 10:56 a.m., but because it takes 15 minutes for a signal to travel the 145 million miles (232 million km) from Mars to Earth, it was about 11:15 a.m. before anxious scientists knew their latest attempt had failed. It was the first time they had tried to get the craft to use its UHF antenna, which is not powerful enough to communicate directly with Earth but is capable of sending a stream of data to the orbiting surveyor for relay to Earth. The hope had been that if the craft's main antenna, which scientists had been using for previous attempts to get in touch with the lander, had failed for some reason, then the UHF might succeed as a backup. A NASA official at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said the latest failure eliminated the possibility that the craft was in a normal operating mode. He said the spacecraft may have landed in a pit and that there were objects blocking the antenna's view of Earth or the surveyor satellite, or it might be unable to perform gyro compassing to determine its geographical location at Mars' south pole, he said.

Cosidering how lame the excuses for the loss of the last Mars Probe were, it would behoove NASA and JPL to get their acts together lest the tax-payers get really unhappy and cut off their allotment!

This year will be the first full Moon to occur on the winter solstice, Dec.22 (commonly called the first day of winter) in about 100 years. Since a full Moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with a lunar perigee (point in the Moon's orbit that is closest to Earth) the Moon will appear about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the point in its elliptical orbit that is farthest from the Earth). And since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the Sun at this time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the Moon is about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this will be the closest perigee of the Moon this year since the Moon's orbit is constantly deforming. If the weather is clear and there is snow cover where you live, it is believed that even car headlights will be superfluous. On December 21, 1866, the Lakota Sioux took advantage of this combination of occurrences and staged a devastating retaliatory ambush on soldiers in the Wyoming Territory. In laymen's terms it will be a super bright full Moon, much more than the usual AND it hasn't happened this way for 133 years! Our ancestors, 133 years ago, saw this. Our descendants 100 or so years from now will see this again. I hope someone else might find this interesting! Remember this will happen December 22, 1999.....

The Space Suttle is back in orbit. Lucie watched the blast off from her home: The shuttle launch was spectacular tonight, I just walk down to the end of my stree and look to the east across the lake and watch it light up the sky and the lake. It's relly beautiful to see. One time the atomspheric condition were just right and about four or five minutes after it went and we were still watching it streak across the sky we heard a rumble, rumble, rumble and the ground started to shake just like it does when you are there. Ilike the night launches because it is so beautiful. The day ones we can see it but son't get the color. The best thing about that night was a 10 year old girl was visiting her grandparents and she had to write a paper about what she saw when she was here. It was a part of the conditions for her getting out of school to come. She thought it was totaly awesome, but then so did I. In all these years of watching them that is the only time it happened.

closing my italics Here is the Nasa live TV URL http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/space/missions/index.html

For a truly unique way of looking at Earth check: http://www.discovery.com/cams/planet/planet.html

Looking forward to the close & bright full moon tomorrow night (and I will be flying, so a fraction closer still). Is the fact that it coincides with the winter solstice relevant, or does that just give us the longest night in which to see it? - oh hang on, just worked it out, this brings the sun as near as possible to brighten the moon. I was thinking how odd that the sun should be nearest the Earth in midwinter (when it's coldest), but of course that's why it's midsummer (& hottest) in the Southern He isphere, I suppose.

Bravo. Your line of reasoning is right-on. I checked the moon just before daylight as it was streaming into my room this morning and it was brilliant. I think one could have read the newspaper by it - or at least the headlines! One tends to forget about the tip of the earth out of plumb which makes these unusual circumstances more fascinating. Pop over to Stonehenge and check the shadows falling over the stones and sight between them. I really wish this were possible for you as I would love a live r port...almost as much as I would like to be doing the live reporting! Happy Solstice Day, Mark!

Sorry I cannot make it to Stonehenge. Even if I could, the stones are now sealed off from the public, and come the solstice you have to brave the hippies New Age Travelers trying to commune spiritually with the Ancient Druids. But maybe my plane will fly over Salisbury Plain, and I'll try and sneak a peek at the moon shadows!

How lovely that would be - flying over Stonehenge in the moonlight. *sigh* I agree entirely with you about the hippie ersatz druids reinventing themselves as they go. Makes the archaeologist and historian in my soul revolt. Another eye-witness of the shuttle launch: "Had a beautiful sight a few nights ago. The TV had the shuttle going up on the split screen, so we ran out. Off to the southeast the sky was turning orangish and getting brighter. Then we could see the torch like flame coming up . We watched the shuttle go on up, and the separation of the boosters and two red dots as they fell back down. Then it just went on up and turned into like a star, it was really bright. We had an exceptional clear night and they said we could see it for about 18 minutes to the curvature of the earth. we went back in the house and then we heard the thunder and rumble of the noise just reaching us. and the windows quivered enough that we could hear them rattle. Must have headed more north instead of south like before. But it was neat, hope to go down sometime and see one."

I was told about the solstice moon but unfortunately the weather has not been cooperating... I'm afraid we're gonna have another New Year's Eve storm :-(

Does this involve bone-chilling dampness and driving rain or do things get cold enough to freeze? I am worried about you and these storms.

Only rain and strong winds... But maybe we'll have better weather for friday.

We gotta stop talking about this out here in other topics...they are worried about you in Geo 14! Did the strong winds do any serious pruning of your trees or your electrical/phone system?

anyone who watched the world-wide pollution extravaganza yesterday under the guise of celebratory fireworks must wonder how long it will circle the earth before it falls as something really nasty...!

This probably belongs on an astronomy topic, but I didn't see one when I looked at the list of conferences, so here it is. My question is about the age of the universe/earth. The universe is currently estimated to be about 13 billion years old. In that time, stars and galaxies have formed, gone through their life cycles, died, gathered back together as nebulae, then created second and maybe third generation systems. Assuming the earth is only a second generation conglomeration of matter, then all of the heavier elements on the earth came from the first generation. Now the earth is estimated to be already about 4 billion years old. That leaves only 9 billion years--or only twice the time the earth has been around--for that first generation to have lived and died and given rise to the second generation. That doesn't seem like enough time to me! Am I missing something? Were life cycles nebulae and galaxies faster in the early universe? If not, how does the creation of the heavier elements work into the current assumptions on the age of the universe? And is this taken into account when people estimate the age of the universe? I would think that any theory which did not allow enough time for at least one cycle to complete itself would be rejected on that basis alone. If there isn't time, then the age can not be right. And can we estimate the age of the universe by estimating the length of time it takes for one cycle.

You found us! Guess I should paste my message here as well as the sunspot gif I think our estimation of the age of the universe will continue to be revised upward as we get bigger and better eyes into the past. For just about forever the age of the Universe was thought not to exceed 5 billion years and wa more likely 4 billion. Theories are just that...always subject to revision and correction, fortunately! This Solar image updates automatically:

that solar deal is neato. it makes me think of an egg yolk when you shine a flashlight through the egg.

Yup! did you see it pulsate? Makes you think your eyes are doing funny things to your mind...

From John Burnett Findings from a new study provide strong support for one of two diametrically opposed theories explaining why people perceive the moon on the horizon as much larger than the elevated moon, a phenomenon known as the moon illusion. The human ability to perceive an object's size accurately regardless of its distance, known as "size constancy," reflects an innate understanding of the inverse proportion between distance and size of the image projected on our retinas. According to the older of the two general explanations for the moon illusion, we see the horizon moon as bigger because the information presented by the intervening terrain affects our perception of distance, so our brains respond as if the moon were closer. Proponents of more recent explanations for the moon illusion argue that perception of distance follows from perception of size. They contend that certain factors cause us to perceive the elevated moon as smaller than the horizon moon and that this illusory size difference, in turn, leads to the perception that the elevated moon is farther away. In an effort to determine whether people perceive the horizon moon as closer or farther away than the elevated moon, a father-son team of scientists from New York University and IBM's Almaden Research Center conducted experiments involving artificial moons projected onto the actual sky using optics and a computer display. In the article, they report that people perceive the halfway point between themselves and artificial horizon moons to be more than four times farther away than the halfway point between themselves and artificial elevated moons. They also show that people perceive an artificial moon of constant size to be smaller when it is moved closer, in keeping with the older theory of the moon illusion.

Original Caption Released with Image: This mosaic of images collected by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on Thanksgiving Day, November 25,1999 shows a fountain of lava spewing above the surface of Jupiter's moon Io. The active lava was hot enough to cause what the camera team describes as "bleeding" in Galileo's camera, caused when the camera's detector is so overloaded by the brightness of the target that electrons spill down across the detector. This shows up as a white blur in the image. Most of the hot material is distributed along a wavy line which is interpreted to be hot lava shooting more than 1.5 kilometers- (1-mile) high out of a long crack, or fissure, on the surface. There also appear to be additional hot areas below this line, suggesting that hot lava is flowing away from the fissure. Initial estimates of the lava temperature indicate that it is well above 1,000 Kelvin (1,300 Fahrenheit) and might even be hotter than 1,600 Kelvin (2,400 Fahrenheit). These images were targeted to provide the first close-up view of a chain of huge calderas (large volcanic collapse pits). These calderas are some of the largest on Io and they dwarf other calderas across the solar system. At 290 by 100 kilometers (180 by 60 miles), this chain of calderas covers an area seven times larger than the largest caldera on the Earth. The new images show the complex nature of this giant caldera on Io, with smaller collapses occurring within the elongated caldera. Also of great interest is the flat-topped mesa on the right. The scalloped margins are typical of a process geologists call "sapping," which occurs when erosion is caused by a fluid escaping from the base of a cliff. On Earth, such sapping features are caused by springs of groundwater. Similar features on Mars are one of the key pieces of evidence for past water on the Martian surface. However, on Io, the liquid is presumed to be pressurized sulfur dioxide. The liquid sulfur dioxide should change to a gas almost instantaneously upon reaching the near-vacuum of Io's surface, blasting away material at the base of the cliff. The sulfur dioxide gas eventually freezes out on the surface of Io in the form of a frost. As the frost is buried by later deposits, it can be heated and pressurized until it becomes a liquid. This liquid then flows out of the ground, completing Io's version of the 'water cycle.' North is to the upper left of the picture and the Sun illuminates the surface from the lower left. The image, centered at 61.1 degrees latitude and 119.4 degrees longitude, covers an area approximately 300 by 75 kilometers (190-by-47 miles). The resolution is 185 meters (610 feet) per picture element. The image was taken at a range of 17,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) by Galileo's onboard camera. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. This image and other images and data received from Galileo are posted on the Galileo mission home page at http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov . Background information and educational context for the images can be found at http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/io/ioimages.html.

Wow! There was something on the BBC Open University about a Lunar eclipse coming up. V. interesting programme but at 1 am. my attention slips. Didn't catch the date or whether it was only applicable to the UK.

I shall look it up and post what I find. It will be at new moon, of course.

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA/data/docs/LunarEclipse.html This page has an eclipse calaulator. I put in my residence for The January 21st lunar eclipse and got the following: Total Eclipse of the Moon HILO, HAWAII o ' o ' W155 05, N19 43 Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time Moon's Azimuth Altitude h m o o Moonrise 2000 Jan 20 18:01 69.0 ---- Moon enters totality 2000 Jan 20 18:04.6 69.3 0.5 Middle of eclipse 2000 Jan 20 18:43.5 72.2 8.4 Moon leaves totality 2000 Jan 20 19:22.3 74.8 16.8 Moon leaves umbra 2000 Jan 20 20:25.4 78.5 30.7 Moon leaves penumbra 2000 Jan 20 21:24.1 81.6 43.8 Moonset 2000 Jan 21 07:29 289.7 ----

I gather that what will be seen is a darkened moon, possibly reddish colour.

Yes, I think so, but since it is close to perigee (last month) it should look very close! BTW, that Jan 21 date was by GMT or Zulu time which is midnight in London (Greenwich, actually) which happens at 2pm here in Hawaii. You need to check that calculator and see what time it happens for you where you live. According to the 1806 Jan 20 entering totality will be the day before the baseball game, alas! But better it rain out the eclipse than the ballgame!

What we see of the moon during an eclipse is the reflected light of the Earth. It is also a function of how close Earth is to the Sun. It should be pretty bright and orange because I think we are close to perihelion, as well.

I wonder if that'd be filmeable with the low-sensitivity Super 8 films I use.... Yeah, we read about that in the paper a few weeks ago. Gonna try get pictures (like I tried of the Hale-Bopp comet - uh, like in "Hail the Bop Apocalyse", have the Heaven Gates folks had read too much Ginsberg? - and the sun-thingus-what-was-the-word-for -it before). Gonna see what I'll do.

Watching old Super 8 movies from the early 70ies, I found that my father had already filmed a solar eclipse (that the word!). Oh, now it starts to snow... And I got a radio show to do in Frankfurt tonight! Darn, hope driving is good, I still need much time to prepare, and always leave five minutes after last minute...

Did anyone see a report about a black hole being discovered 'near' earth - I think 160,000 light years away. Report said it was the size of 30 million of our suns, but the gravitational pull was puzzlingly lower than expected. Report came from Washington, so I expect there's more info in US than the UK. Excuse me for being stupid - how do I work out my location to use the table on the site you quoted Marcia. What's the radio show Alexander?

What's the radio show and when're you gonna get a tape of it to Terry so we can see you on SpringCam? The eclipse should en easily photographable if you have timed photography available on your camera. Open the lens as wide as it will go and leave for 30 sec. then one minute then 45 sec....bracket it well and you should have no trouble. Perhaps, if the Moon is unusually dark you may have to leave the shutter open for a few minutes or more.

As to how to find out your location on that eclipse calculator, I just put Hilo, HI, USA.... You use Outer Gronkster, Thistleberry, England or whatever..

Oh I didn't realise it was that easy - I thought I had to put coordinates in!!!

Whoops! non-US form is different. It does require degrees north etc. I'll have to get the atlas out to find out where I am!!!

Whip out the Ordnance Survey maps. I have their atlas if you are having trouble locating yourself with co-ordinates. Just tell me where you are (town wise) and I will go "down the hall and up the stairs" for you!

Thank you. High Wycombe, Bucks, England

(Radio: my monthly appearance as part of the weekly "superstar rotation" show, 2 hours on Frankfurt's Radio X - this one was titled "Respect For Joe Strummer" to honour a great songwriter and creative muscian; we played material from his London '77 band The Clash to his Nov. 99 release with his new band)

Fantastic, Alexander! You are not on the Internet as yet, is that correct? I would listen to you read the phone book in a language I do not understand just to listen to your Teutonic/Brit accent. Maggie, High Wyckcombe is 21� North latitude, and 4.85� West longitude if I am reading this correctly!

Let's give High Wycombe another try. 51.5 North Latitude and 0.28 West longitude.

Thanks, let's hope it's not another cloudy night like last time!!!

I just saw in the paper that iceballs the size of melons have been landing in Spain. I think 11 have landed so far. Various theories have been put forward as to their origin. The main contender seems to be that it is comet debris, although pranksters have not been ruled out. It is curious that no iceballs have landed in France or Portugal, just Spain.

Lunar Eclipses always happen during FULL moon. I somehow got it messed up with a solar eclipse which does happen during new moon. I stated the opposite on response 47, proving once again that I am not only mortal, but that I should be held accountable for my information. I welcome corrections and clarifying at all times! For those of you living in the Florida area and especially, Tallahassee, and happen to be FSU fans / alums, this is for you (Thanks, Barbara!) It also contains good information on why the moon is different colors from eclipse to eclipse. From: http://www.tdo.com/news/local/0119.loc.lunar.htm Lunar eclipse to pass through on Thursday night Tallahassee's weather is predicted to be ideal for viewing the eclipse, the last until 2003. By GERALD ENSLEY Tallahassee Democrat Grab your coat and crank up the Pink Floyd: We're all going to see a dark side of the moon Thursday when a total lunar eclipse will be visible all over North and South America. The eclipse will begin at 9:03 p.m. Thursday and reach its darkest phase between 11:05 p.m. and 12:22 a.m. Friday. This is the first total lunar eclipse visible in the United States since September 1997 -- and the last we'll see again until May 2003. The weather in Tallahassee should be ideal, if nippy, for eclipse-viewing. A cold front moving through North Florida is expected to clear out by Thursday afternoon. Forecasters at the National Weather Service said temperatures will be in the 40s Thursday night, and it will feel colder because of a steady breeze. But the sky will be clear. The event is being billed as one of the most spectacular lunar eclipses in a decade. The shadow on the moon is expected to be deep orange-red in color -- much like a sunset. The shadow is also expected to be the most sharply visible for a lunar eclipse since 1991, when an erupting volcano in the Philippines (Mt. Pinatubo) saturated the Earth's atmosphere with a film of ash and dust. A lunar eclipse is when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon in such a way as to cast the Earth's shadow across the lunar face. A solar eclipse, which is more infrequent, occurs when the moon passes between the sun and the Earth in such a way as to block the sun's light to the Earth. The shadow the Earth casts on the moon is called the "umbra." The thin ring of light around the shadow is called the "penumbra." The Tallahassee Astronomical Society will host a viewing at Lake Ella. The group will set up telescopes, and members of the club will be available to discuss the eclipse and other heavenly bodies. During an eclipse, many faintly seen stars and planets become more visible. Gerald Ensley has been with the Tallahassee Democrat since 1980. A former sportswriter, he is now a general assignment reporter and columnist. He has won more than 20 state and national awards for his writing.

Maggie, I saw the bowling-ball-sized hailstones on the Television news this morning and was astounded. They are HUGE!!! I will post the lab reports when they become available.

i still haven't seen those. it'll be interesting once they figure out what's going on. makes me think of the crop circles. ooooh, i should include this stuff in paraspring.

here's an article on the melon-sized iceballs: Comet Debris, Not Excrement, Rains on Spain MADRID (Reuters) - At least ten melon-sized ice balls that have slammed into Spain in the last week are probably debris from comets, not human excrement as first suspected, a Spanish scientist said Monday. Enrique Martinez, head of a team at the Higher Council of Scientific Investigation studying the phenomenon, said it was first thought that the ice balls were human excrement ejected from high-flying aircraft. ``But they lack the typical coloring and texture we find in those cases,'' he said. A man in southern Spain escaped injury last week when an ice ball eight inches across weighing nine pounds smashed into his car. A further nine ice balls have since been reported around Spain over the last week. human excrement? geeze louise. too bad they didn't have any pictures!

wait, did you see that? "they lack the typical coloring and texture we find in those [human excrement from aircraft] cases." gross!!!!

Yup! Those aircrafty objects often drop *stuff* out, but it is usually that bluish-green disinfectant color. These look like snowballs or hailstones (which I am sure they are - NOT human stuff). Thanks for posting the article. Those were the ones they showed on the telly this morning!

Some scientists seemed to think they might be from a meteor but as another pointed out this couldn't be because the heat of the meteor hitting the earths atmosphere would melt any ice.

quite true. check out a pic i found while searching the news sites:

Yes....they are very large hailstones, I am sure. How they got that big will be interesting to learn. No go outside and look at the moon! It is cloudy here...really cloudy!!!

Wolfie!! You did it!!! Brava, my dear. *H U G S * wow!!! Thanks oodles and wads for that. How amazing!!!

oh, and the lunar eclipse is quite underway. i've tried to get pictures of it at each interval as it enters into totality. fifteen minutes more to go. (am using a regular minolta 35mm so don't expect anything news worthy, but am trying)

the scientist with his hand on his head looking at this thing is classic!

It really is red, very beautiful. This must be what the ancients saw when the said there ws blood on the moon. I have seen many lunar eclipses but none like this

Wow!~!! Red! Nrevedr seen a red one...does the moon look like it is suspended between the stars and the earth? It looks more like a sphere during totality than at any other time. Lovely of you to keep me posted! Yeah, I loved that guy in the lab coat with his hand on his head. Wolfie, I downloaded it to my files in case you ever need it,

The lunar eclipse was "snowed out" where I am. I'd love to see your pictures, Wolf. I got some pictures of the Sept. 26, 1996 lunar eclipse, which can be seen at http://world.std.com/~vbrown/p_le96.htm. I also use Minolta 35mm cameras (XG-M and SRT-101); you can still get some good shots with 'em! I think the most important tools for astrophotography are a sturdy tripod, and decent lenses.

Myh son in California with his digital camera came through! Lovely pix and very red!!! Yippee!!!

Ginny! Welcome! How exciting to have a second IRL person posting on Geo. I am so delighted with your eclipse pictures - one which was unavailable out here. It seems you were about the only one I was in contact with who had success. Portugal and Germany both had problems. You have one of the best lenses it would appear and a good sturdy tripod to keep your images sharp. Mahalo! Visit frequently!

As soon as my FTP works to Spring's hard drive I will post the pictures David took from California. Spectacular! Never saw a red moon - ever! If anyone MUST see them before Terry gets the tarballs back where they belong, I will email some to you...let me know!

When asked what camera he was using, my son reeplied with the following: It is a Nikon Coolpix 950 with a x2 telephoto lens which makes my 35 mm equivalent of 200 mm. Now you know. Thanks for the bragging. As soon as I can ftp to access.spring.net we can all see them!

Can't wait, Marcia. Clouds obscured the view here in London - and of course today is cloudless, just like the night before was cloudless ... #@�X#�&!!

Thanks, Marcia! I use a 500mm f8 mirror lens with my old Minolta SRT-101 for all my astrophotography pictures. I generally use high-speed color film (800 ASA and 1600 ASA). Dave's pictures from the digital camera came out great! It seems like the digital cameras are really improving. I also have solar eclipse pictures from 1994 and 1998, and comet pictures up on the same web site. (http://world.std.com/~vbrown under the "Photo Gallery" link)

marcia, e the pics to me and i'll store them at geocities until ftp is up and running again!

Splendid, Ginny. It is so great to see your posts in here. One day I will take you to my Arthuriana Topic in the Books Conference... Will get to your other eclipse pix shortly...happy me!!! Mark, Your sentiments echo mine. Bad enough it was cloudy - but it rained hard enough to make listening to myself think just about impossible. Now, please get it over with before this weekend's baseball games, thank you! As soon as all of the hard drives for Spring are in place in their new homes and I again have access to them, I shall be ftp'ing my son's great photos and posting them for your perusal. Until then all I can do is to hold them up to the monitor....*sigh*

THanks, Wolfie, they will be on their way shortly!!!

I am happy to report that the eclipse was gorgeous in Tallahassee; very clear and when it started, the moon was huge! As the article that our gracious host posted said, there was a gathering at Lake Ella (an artificial, small lake a few miles from where I live), but the night was very cold and the sky was so clear that I only had to step out into our balcony to get a wonderful view. I alternated the eclipse with the Pakistan/India cricket match (Pak won!), so it was an eventful night. I went to bed past m dnight, and it was still on. The red shadow was spectacular and the view of the nightsky something to remember.

How spectacular. I was also listening to the cricket match (congrats, Pak!) The only thing better than my seeing an eclipse is for others to see it and post their comments. Thanks, Lidya... It must have been a chicken-skin experience. The best ones seem to be in a sparkly clear and cold night sky! Thanks, Dear! Now, to send Wolfie David's pix so I can post them...

Looking forward to seeing the pix as we had a cloudy sky in High Wycombe (England).

Yup! Guess if Mark was overcast you were, as well. They will be up ASAP...

I didn't get to see anything - overcast and cloudy. Bah! Wolf, you are my only hope to get to see this. (Radio: No, Radio X doesn't webcast yet. No budget - it's a members-club broadcaster working of membership dues and donations only. No commercial aspects, no/few public fundings. Crap equipment. Great spirit.)

From Moon Dreams: I saw the whole eclipse! It was beautiful! We had a perfect cool clear night, not one cloud in the sky. I used my binoculars for the details. From white to grey and then the orangy/red border appeared until it was completely covered by it. With the naked eye it looked as if it were Jupiter. Those red moon rays have done their magic on me. In Dec. we had the closest moon to earth in years I was in Milan and it was also a clear crisp night. In Aug. I was in Lake Como during the solar eclipse and that was a bad experience. We all felt dizzy and were affected in a negative way. The lunar eclipse was the complete opposite. :-D I heard from my friends in London who got up at 3:45am to watch it but the sky was completely covered with the usual stark grey clouds and did not see a thing. I am still moondancing!

the eclipse was indeed beautiful. it was cold and our part of the sky was clear as a bell and i think i was able to discern more stars than usual. my pictures stunk (had them developed today). i went out with my binoculars and got a lens full of red moon. now to david's pics!

the above is my fave!

It was so beautiful, red, red with a halo of light.

Thank you Wolfie! *hugs* How lovely they are! He had trouble seeing it with the naked eye and sent me that picture too - totally black! It was slightly overcase so you see wispy clouds going past the moon... It must have been incredible in a clear sky! Last night with the reports coming in and the pictures, too was about as close as I could get to actually seeing it. Thank you all! Now, to tell his father (who has logged in and can post any time he chooses...) and David as well...*grin*

I'm so excited to see the pix, and fed up that we weren't able to see anything here. Thanks.

I know the feeling...*lol* I am delighted that someone in the family got to see it...and as all good mom's, I would rather he saw it than I if we had to choose.

Great pics, Wolf! Thanks!

This is from the E. Telegraph today. Lost Asteroid is Earth's, new Moon I think you will enjoy. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=001182080732013&rtmo=kLLZ1JNp&atmo=kLLZ1JNp&pg=/et/00/1/25/whub25.html I hope the link works. I know Terry is in the middle of moving.

Love the Eskimo Nebula! What incredible pictures!!! Thanks so much for posting this, Moon (great name for this topic !) I was busy on Geo 14 posting information on "the snow storm of the millennuim" (it is bound to be called something liket that), and had not seen anything about Hubble and the new pictures. Thanks! And, please don't be a stranger!

John Burnett sent this contribution. It is fascinating! Can time run backwards? IN a distant galaxy, a star unexplodes. Just moments ago a shell of tortured matter was flying together at 30 000 kilometers a second. Now it has become a star, and the last shreds of glowing debris are being sucked in. With the explosion undone, the star begins the long journey back to the time when it will be unborn into the gas and dust of an interstellar cloud. Is someone running the film backwards for comic effect? Not necessarily. In a paper published in the last week of 1999, Lawrence Schulman of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York dropped a bombshell. He showed that regions where time flows in the normal direction can coexist with regions where it flows backwards. There could be places, perhaps even within our Galaxy, where stars unexplode, eggs unbreak and living things grow younger with every second. To understand how time could run backwards, you need to understand why it has a preferred direction at all. The equations of physics say that particles of matter don't care what direction time runs in: any interaction between two particles could happen just as easily in reverse. (Some nuclear interactions do show a small bias, but no one has found a way to turn this into an arrow of time.) But when you have a lot of particles instead of just two, things change. Messy, disordered states tend to develop from tidier ones. This tendency is called the thermodynamic arrow of time. Physicists say that entropy-a measure of disorder-always increases. "It's easy to break an egg, difficult or impossible to put the pieces back together," says Schulman. Say the air in a large room is confined in a 1-metre cube in one corner, then released. It is perfectly possible that, after five minutes, the air molecules will all be back in the same 1-metre cube. Perfectly possible but hugely improbable, because there are far more ways to arrange the individual molecules when they are spread out than when they are confined. In fact, the most disordered state-in which the air molecules are spread more or less evenly throughout the room-can be achieved in far more ways than any other state. "This is the second law of thermodynamics," says Schulman, "which seals the fate of Humpty Dumpty." However, argues Schulman, a reverse arrow is perfectly possible: "It's all down to the 'boundary conditions'-the external constraints imposed on the system." In the room, the air has to be in the 1-metre cube only at the start of the five-minute period. There is no constraint on it at the end of the five minutes-the system can find its own final state. But say a final condition is imposed. After five minutes, the air molecules have to be back in the 1-metre cube. On Earth, this is clearly an artificial situation. But for Schulman, it is perfectly legitimate to consider such a state of affairs. "There is no reason in principle why the Universe might not have a future boundary condition imposed on it," he says. The future condition would constrain the molecules to follow only a tiny subset of trajectories, ending up in the 1-metre cube. From our point of view, time would be running backwards. But there's an objection to having forward and backward time regions in the same universe. Surely the arrow of a reverse-time region would be wiped out by the slightest interaction with a normal-time region, leaving a completely disordered system with no arrow at all? Imagine a game of snooker in which the triangle of red balls is struck by the cue ball and scattered around the table. Now imagine the reverse-time scenario. For the balls to follow the precise trajectories necessary to finish in a triangle will take a monumental amount of coordination. The slightest disturbance will spoil it. Any interaction with a region with normal time-for instance, the smallest cry of amazement from someone watching-could vibrate the air, nudge the balls and wreck everything. So the backward arrow of a reverse-time region would be instantly destroyed by any interaction with a normal-time region. Schulman sees a flaw in this idea. The two systems are on an equal footing, so the reverse-time region is as likely to destroy the arrow of the normal-time region as vice versa. "All we can say is that if the two regions interact their arrows will either both be destroyed or both survive." Most physicists would have put good money on the former possibility. But Schulman's startling conclusion is that as long as the interaction between the two regions is weak, both arrows will survive. He bases this claim on a simple computer model that allows him to set up weakly interacting systems with opposite arrows of time and see what happens. Here's how it works. Take a square 1 unit on each side, and add a particle with coordinates x and y. Move the particle by repeatedly replacing x with x + y and y with x + 2y, and discarding any integer parts of the results (so x and y stay in the range from 0 to 1). The particle will flit about the square chaotically. "This mimics the essential behaviour of a gas particle, while being a lot simpler than reality," according to Schulman. To set up two gases with opposite arrows of time, Schulman imposes appropriate boundary conditions. In one model gas, the particles start in one corner of the square and spread out until they are completely disordered. They have a "normal" arrow of time (that is, the same arrow as us). In the other, Schulman imposes the final condition that after, say 20 moves, corresponding to 20 time steps, the particles are all in the corner of the square. This system has a backward arrow of time. Call the normal-time region Alice and the reverse-time region Bob. The next step is to let Alice and Bob interact. Schulman tweaks the coordinates of each normal-time particle according to the coordinates of the reverse-time test particle, and vice versa. When Schulman lets both systems run, he finds that neither arrow of time is destroyed by the other. "All that happens is that Bob adds a bit of noise to Alice and Alice adds a bit of noise to Bob," says Schulman. The two arrows of time are remarkably robust. "I had no idea when I started my work that this would be the outcome," he says. "The result surprised me as much anyone else." But this surprise, he adds, comes from a prejudice against future boundary conditions. Once you are used to the idea of matter having some memory of what we call its future, it ceases to surprise. From our point of view, the memory of future organization drags any reverse time region in the direction of increasing order, despite any small disturbances from our own "normal" region. The paper has created quite a stir. "This is very cool stuff indeed," says Max Tegmark of the University of Pennsylvania. At the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, where Sculman began this work, Amos Ori agrees. "Schulman has shown that the consistency of a model with two simultaneous time arrows can be explored by relatively simple means. This is a very important observation." And he has some equivocal support from David Pegg of Griffith University in Brisbane. "I see no obvious flaw in the calculations Schulman has done. He makes his case quite well and I am willing to accept it, at least until convinced otherwise." Other physicists don't believe that Schulman's computer model is relevant to the real world. According to Paul Davies of the University of Adelaide, a real physical system with a backward arrow would be so fantastically sensitive to an outside influence that it would be easily destroyed. "Imagine a box of gas with molecular velocities reversed to bring about an ordered state," he says. "The gravity of a single electron at the edge of the observable Universe is enough to throw out the motion of a given molecule by 90 degrees after only 20 or so intermolecular collisions. That's pretty sensitive." Crossing the divide Surprisingly, Schulman does not dispute Davies' point. "He's absolutely right. But the very set-up of his thought experiment, with initial conditions only, precludes an opposite-directed arrow," he says. "My result applies when boundary conditions are imposed at two separate times." Some might attack the realism of Schulman's interaction, which he admits is an abstract mathematical one and not related to a real physical force such as gravity. "Nevertheless, I maintain that the interaction is adequate for treating the conceptual issue of the effects of future-conditioning," he says. So could we actually see reverse-time beings if they exist, and maybe even wave to them? Remarkably, Schulman says yes. Using a theory originally developed by Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, which treats light waves travelling in both time directions on an equal footing, he shows that forward and reverse regions could communicate by light signals. But communicating with the other side has its dangers. If normal-time Alice were to see rain pouring out through reverse-time Bob's window, she could wait until before the rain started and shout to Bob to close his window. "So did Bob's floor get wet or not?" says Schulman. Perhaps something intermediate happens which smears out the paradox. "Alice sees the window open, shouts to Bob but the message gets blurred and Bob doesn't close the window," says Schulman. And there's another, more disturbing possibility. "If you impose initial and final boundary conditions, it may turn out that the events described simply can't happen," he says. "In mathematical terms, they are simply not a solution." In other words, we might just be fated not to cause any paradoxes. So, how would a reverse-time region arise? Schulman says such regions may exist for the same inexplicable reason that regions of normal time exist. But there is one more concrete possibility: perhaps we live in a Universe whose expansion from a big bang will one day be reversed into a contraction down to a "big crunch", a sort of mirror-image of the big bang in which the Universe was born 13 billion years ago. Although the latest cosmological evidence is against this, the question isn't settled. In 1958, Thomas Gold of Cornell University argued that the thermodynamic arrow of time would reverse during the contraction phase, creating order out of chaos. Gold's reasoning turned out to be flawed, but in the 1970s, Schulman used his own model to show that the conclusions were right. As the big bang and big crunch are both highly ordered (all the matter is in a small volume), thermodynamic arrows of time should point away from both ends. The arrow of time depends on the expansion or contraction of the Universe. "Coffee cools because the quasar 3C 273 grows ever more distant," says Schulman. Of course, if you were alive during a cosmic contraction phase you would see nothing untoward-you'd have the same arrow as most of the matter in the Universe, and it would look like expansion (see Diagram). Stepping outside the Universe, the situation appears perfectly symmetrical; it makes just as much sense to call either end the big bang or the big crunch. A bizarre consequence of Schulman's theory is that some reverse-time regions from a future contracting phase of the Universe could have survived until today-and could be only a few tens of light years away. "Some bits of the Universe might have reverse arrows while other bits with forward arrows might survive well into the contraction phase." As the "turnaround" time when the Universe's expansion turns into contraction could be many hundreds of billions of years away, any stars would have burnt out. Unfortunately, there would be little prospect of seeing stellar unexplosions or backwards people among such cold stuff. "We would still feel their gravity, though," says Schulman. "Such reverse-time matter would have all the attributes of the invisible, or 'dark', matter thought to make up most of the mass of our Universe." Colliding arrows Another possibility is that in the 13 billion years since the big bang most of the Universe's matter has collided with reverse-time matter from the future. The result of such collisions would be matter in "equilibrium" with no time direction. "Once again, it would appear exactly like dark matter," says Schulman. Other physicists are skeptical. "I doubt that this has anything to do with the dark matter problem," says Tegmark. So what would it be like in a region that is changing its time direction? Would exploding things suddenly start unexploding? And what would happen to the minds of beings around at the time? Sadly, it would be rather undramatic. For a particular area to change its arrow, it would first have to go through a period of maximum disorder where there could be no stars or explosions or structured, working minds. But if you survived for long enough, you might be able to watch the Universe around you starting to contract, and most of its matter going into reverse. If all this is getting a bit difficult to stomach, there is a way to test it-even if we can't spy on a nearby backwards planet. "Things happening today could be influenced by boundary conditions at the end of the Universe," says Schulman. What he has in mind are ultra-slow processes. In the 1970s, John Wheeler of Princeton University suggested observing the decays of atomic nuclei with ultra-long half-lives, perhaps many tens of billions of years. The suggestion was that the normal exponential decay would be modified by exponential "undecay" and that this might actually be observable in a sample of a few kilograms in the laboratory. Possible candidates are rhenium-187 and samarium-147, which have half-lives of about 100 billion years. Unfortunately, Wheeler was too optimistic. For an experiment of a sensible duration, a few years, say, you'd need roughly the total supply of these isotopes in the Universe to see deviations from exponential decay. "A far better bet is galaxy clustering," says Schulman. He believes that the way galaxies cluster together could be affected by a future contraction phase. Unfortunately, he has not yet worked out what form this effect might take. But over the past few years, a small group of physicists have been claiming that the Universe has an inexplicable fractal structure. Most cosmologists disagree, partly because they have no way to explain such a bizarre pattern. But say there is something in it. Could it perhaps be a memory of the future? ### Further reading: Time's Arrows and Quantum Measurement by L. S. Schulman (Cambridge University Press, 1997) Author: Marcus Chown New Scientist issue 5th February 2000 PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO : http://www.newscientist.com

In the UK Times today: Found: The hibernation Gene that could send man to the stars! Scientists have discovered genes for hibernation in humans. The discovery could pave the way for human hibernation of the kind forshadowed for astronauts in the 30 year old film 2001: A pace odessey. Human hibernation would ake ultrlong haul space travel feasible, with crews effectively put to sleep for months, even years, by triggering the hibernation genes that man's distant ancestors used millions of years ago to sleepthrough hostile winters. The first use of hibernation technology is likely to be in transplant surgery, where donor organs would be preserved on shelves for weeks or months by putting them into a state of deep sleep. After a five year project, Matthew andrews, associate professor of genetics at North Carolina State University has idenfied two genes - PL and PDK-4 - which appear to mastermind hibewrnation. One stops carbohydrate metabolism ewhich ensures that the glucose that animals have stored in their body from their last meal is preserved for use by the brain and central nervous system. The second gene controls the production of an enzyme that breaks up stored fatty acids, and converts then into usable fats for fuel. As result the animal can tick over on its stored fat. ..... Researchers found the genes can be made to work in similar ways [to animals] in humans. They also hope to dientify what genesare involved in triggering the loss of body fat, and to find a way of kick-starting the same genes in humans as a way of losing weight.

Amazing stuff, Maggie. Thanks for posting this. I had no idea!

I like the idea of the weight loss gene!!!! Seriously, it could revolutionise space travel and make things possible. Did you see anything on the newly discovered black hole that's near earth?

I have seen nothing. I am off to go a search for information about it. Thanks for the reminder. (If your body stayed the same shape would you care what you weighed? It is just a number and is entirely asbitrary!)

I'm just glad I don't have talking scales - numbers have power don't you know!

Yup! Numbers do have power. Even for the long and willowy sort who wishes she were more horizontally endowed. *sigh* Whoever though up talking appliances had nothing else to think about, obviously. Very weird, Indeed!

What do you think about talking spaceships? or computers for that matter. If we were weightless (e.g. in space) would size matter?????

Size would have to matter. The smaller the individuals, the more that could be accommodated, I would think. Everything has a load limit and the support system making the air to breathe and food to eat would have to be considered pr capita. I know of no way to eliminate the mass even if it is weightless!

Oh what a pity, just think of the airline bags you could take if weight didn't matter!!! Sorry, it's late and I'm feeling goofy.

When you ship via air freight, the cost for moving it is by the cubic foot, not by weight. Who said life was fair?!

From http://www.skypub.com/news/news.shtml Tuesday, February 1 New Martian Meteorite Discovered in California About 20 years ago, Robert S. Verish was on a rock-collecting trip in Southern California�s Mojave Desert. While walking around, he spotted a couple of dark basaltic rocks. Interested, Verish scooped them up, took them home, and put them in a box for safe keeping. It wasn�t until last October that Verish realized he stumbled upon a great find. While cleaning, he noticed that the rocks he collected looked surprising like meteorites. Excited, he brought samples of each rock to geochemist Alan Rubin (University of California, Los Angeles). Rubin confirmed the rocks to be meteorites and noted the similarity they had to a Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1994. "It was immediately obvious it was similar to Martian meteorites," says Rubin. "Within two minutes we were convinced." "There may be other pieces out there," Rubin notes. "The problem is we don�t know where 'out there' is. If we knew specifically where it was, we could look out there for more." This find brings the current number of known Martian meteorites to 14, and the Los Angeles meteorites are only the second piece of Mars to be found in the United States. The first, named Lafayette, was discovered in Indiana in 1931. Meteorites are known to be of Martian origin largely for two reasons. First, gases trapped in the rock match that of the Martian atmosphere. Second, the rock�s oxygen isotopic ratios are unlike other meteorites or any Earth rock, but they match the ratios found on Mars. The rocks were likely ejected from Mars during a large impact event, making their way to Earth in less than a million years.

I think this is the black hole Maggie was asking about... Chandra Finds a "Cool" Black Hole at the Heart of the Andromeda Galaxy CXC PR: 00-03 January 14, 2000 Steve Roy Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL Phone: 256-544-6535 http://www.msfc.nasa.gov/news Dr. Wallace Tucker Chandra X-ray Observatory Center Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA Phone: 617-496-7998 In its first look at the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found that the gas funneling into a supermassive black hole in the heart of this galaxy is a "cool" million degrees. This unexpected result adds one more quirk to the strange behavior previously observed at the center of M31. A team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass., reported on this observation at the 195th national meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta, Ga. The team is led by Drs. Stephen Murray and Michael Garcia, and includes Drs. Frank Primini, William Forman, Christine Jones, and Ralph Kraft. Chandra took its first X-ray picture of the Andromeda Galaxy with the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer on October 13, 1999. More than 100 individual X-ray sources were seen. One of these sources was at the previously determined position of the central supermassive black hole, which has the mass of 30 million suns. With many X-ray emitting stars in the center of M31 there was a slight chance that one of them might be at this position just by coincidence. The low temperature of the suspected central source, as compared to the other sources, gave the team the clue they needed. "When we found that what we suspected was the central object was also anomalously cool, we KNEW we had it� one coincidence might be believable, but two was too much to ignore!" said Garcia. While the gas falling into the central black hole is cool, it is only cool by comparison to the 100 other X-ray sources in the Andromeda Galaxy. To be detected by an X-ray telescope, the gas must have a temperature of more than a million degrees. The typical X-ray star in the Andromeda Galaxy has a temperature of several tens of millions of degrees. In contrast, the temperature of the supermassive black hole source is a few million degrees. The Andromeda Galaxy is our nearest neighbor spiral galaxy at a distance of two million light years. It is similar to our own Milky Way in size, shape, and also contains a supermassive black hole at the center. This central black hole has always been a bit odd when compared to central black holes in similar galaxies. Based on its X-ray luminosity, it is much fainter in radio waves than expected. Such behavior, coupled with Chandra�s discovery of the low temperature gas, cannot be accommodated by standard models developed for supermassive black holes in galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda. "The Chandra observation is telling us that an entirely different flow pattern is operating around the Andromeda black hole," said Dr. Eliot Quataert, of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J. "This will require a different class of models than usually considered." One possibility is that the gas undergoes a large scale boiling motion which slows down the rate at which gas falls into the black hole. The best previous X-ray pictures were not sharp enough to clearly distinguish the X-ray source associated with the black hole in the center of the Andromeda Galaxy nor did they give information about the temperature of the source. "A good analogy might be to say that previous X-ray images were taken with a slightly out-of-focus black and white camera, while the Chandra image is taken with a sharp, color camera" said Murray. Another intriguing feature of this observation is the detection of a diffuse glow that extends for a thousand light years around the central region. It is not known if this is due to many individual sources, or to a hot wind expanding out from the center. "This is just a first, quick look at our nearest Milky Way analog," Murray emphasized. "I expect that our future pictures will lead to more exciting discoveries in the Andromeda Galaxy." The ACIS instrument was built for NASA by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and Pennsylvania State University, University Park. To follow Chandra's progress, visit the Chandra site at: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cycle1/0007/index.html AND http://chandra.nasa.gov NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program. TRW, Inc., Redondo Beach, Calif., is the prime contractor for the spacecraft. The Smithsonian's Chandra X-ray Center controls science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass. High resolution digital versions of the X-ray image (JPG, 300 dpi TIFF ) and other information associated with this release are available on the Internet at: http://chandra.harvard.edu/

Ginny! Thanks for these posts and for finding the black hole which I had not had time to search for. I actually spent yesterday hunting up new graphics (and better ones) for the topics in here with great success. Zowie! Meteorite is number 1 on my wish list. I just need a wee little piece. The closest to anything like that is the tectite David got for me some years ago. I am not all that sure they are ejecta from the moon, but they are very odd-looking rocks, and I am happy to have one.

Space Shuttle Launched From Florida Complex CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The space shuttle Endeavour roared off the launch pad Friday on a long-delayed radar mapping mission that should produce the best ever three-dimensional images of Earth's surface. The six-astronaut crew will spend 11 days in space as they bounce radar signals off cities, fields, mountains and forests, almost everything, in fact, that shapes the Earth's surface between the polar regions. As those signals bounce back into space, they will be collected by antennae aboard the orbiter and at the end of a 197-foot mast deployed from the shuttle's cargo bay. It is those slightly off-set images, like the ones seen in a 3-D movie or picture, that should make this whole-Earth topographical map the best ever assembled. NASA had been trying to launch this mission since September, but technical glitches and safety concerns kept Endeavour grounded. A launch attempt last week was scrubbed by cold winds and heavy rain, and mission managers used the delay to replace a faulty piece of flight hardware that engineers detected late in the countdown. ``Liftoff of space shuttle Endeavour on a 21st century mission, putting Earth back on the map,'' said launch commentator Joel Wells as Endeavour sailed through the clear blue skies above the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch was delayed by about 20 minutes past its 12:30 p.m. scheduled launch time for last-minute technical checks. Once the astronauts have stowed their spacesuits and configured shuttle systems for orbit, the first major task will be to deploy the radar mast, which when fully extended will be the longest fixed structure ever to fly in space. ------------------------------------------------------------ Watch it live http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/countdown/video/video45m.html

I have been watching the Nasa feed all afternoon and watched the antenna which is going to map the world in fine detail operate. I hope you all smiled and looked up every 90 minutes as the shuttle circled the earth. More about this mission will be taken up on http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/restricted/read/geo/5/new

From http://dailynews.yahoo.com Monday February 21 12:40 PM ET Shuttle Crew Solves Hatch Glitch, Set for Return By Brad Liston CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour ended their ambitious Earth-mapping work on Monday and prepared to come home, but not without some last-minute anxiety as they struggled to shut a hatch. Following a final mapping pass over Australia, the astronauts began to stow their radar gear for Tuesday's scheduled landing, but there was trouble with the 20-story radar deployed just hours after their Feb. 11 liftoff. Although the 197-foot collapsible truss-structure folded easily into its canister in Endeavour's cargo bay, three latches designed to secure the canister's hatch refused to lock into place. The Endeavour astronauts, working remote controls from the orbiter's crew compartment, tried three times to shut the lid before finally succeeding, using a maximum force setting. Cheers erupted in Houston's Mission Control Center when ground controllers saw the hatch close successfully in a television feed from the orbiter. ``Excellent job. A little extra work and well worth the effort,'' Mission Control told the astronauts. If the astronauts had not been able to close the hatch, Mission Control probably would have ordered the astronauts to detonate small explosives that would have tossed the mast and its canister overboard. Although two of the astronauts were trained to leave the orbiter and repair the mast, NASA discarded that option on Saturday when the space agency ordered an extra nine hours of mapping, using time that had been reserved for the contingency spacewalk. Tense Moments In Space The 2-1/2 hours spent on Monday trying to close the latches provided tense moments on the ground and in space. After one failed attempt, mission commander Kevin Kregel radioed a disappointed assessment: ``It's a little bit closed.'' Even if the mast had been sacrificed, the glitch would not have affected the focus of Endeavour's mission, collecting radar readings that will be used to create the most detailed 3-D surface maps ever assembled. Since taking flight on Feb. 11, the shuttle has mapped more than 46 million square miles of Earth's land formations, most of it twice. The data was stored on 326 digital cassettes inside Endeavour's crew compartment. Only about two to three percent of Earth's topography has been mapped in the kind of resolution that NASA hopes to accomplish with this mission. The U.S. military will be the chief beneficiary. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which supplies classified maps for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, is NASA's primary partner on this flight. Most of the highest resolution images are likely to remain classified. A lower resolution map, still superior to existing planetary topography images, will be made public. Scientists will be given access to the higher resolution images on a case-by-case basis, NASA said.

The U.S. military will be the chief beneficiary. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which supplies classified maps for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, is NASA's primary partner on this flight. You betcha. That's why I was waving and smiling peacefully each time they took my picture. Sheesh! Is anyone surprised?! I have a molten lava flows to sell for your future houselots. Get'em while they're hot!!!

Most of the highest resolution images are likely to remain classified. A lower resolution map, still superior to existing planetary topography images, will be made public. Scientists will be given access to the higher resolution images on a case-by-case basis, NASA said. Sorta, need-to-own basis? And, I wanted a new atlas to add to my library. Mine is very old... phooey! (Still have those hot lava flows for ya if you're interested...*grin*)

I found all that to be very disappointing, too. Our tax dollars support all this, just so the government can turn around and say we don't need to see it?? phooey is right! :-P

Dontcha wonder where our right to know and their obsession with being the most powerful begin and end?! Be sure to check on Bechtel. Your Boston dig is just a legit front for a REALLY big deal going on. Years ago, when A Rockefeller was vice president of the US, one of his brothers built the Mauna Kea Beach Resort on the Kona side of this island. When we drove by and my dad saw the Bechtel sign on the construction "shack" he simply uttered the name and fell silent. Those were the days when Scandia laboratories had highly-guarded test facilities high up on Mauna Loa. ...and, my Dad was a Knights Templar and a 33� Mason. Anyone get a connection (not sure I do, but there are those out there nodding!)

This is an old news story, but I thought it might still be of interest since we were talking about black holes recently. It's really exciting that they are finally starting to find evidence of black holes; they've theorized about supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies for more than a decade! New evidence of black hole at Milky Way's center January 7, 1998 Web posted at: 10:03 p.m. EST (0303 GMT) WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A massive black hole, with a mass 2.6 million times that of the sun, sits at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, providing its gravitational anchor, according to new evidence unveiled by astronomers Wednesday. Research teams in Germany and the United States found that some stars near the black hole, named Sagittarius A, are speeding along at more than 600 miles a second -- nearly 2.2 million miles per hour (3.5 million kph). "This is the strongest case we have yet for a super, massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way," said astronomer Andreas Eckart at a news conference sponsored by the American Astronomical Society. Sagittarius A is about 26,000 light years from our sun and the planets that revolve around it. A light year is about 6 trillion miles (9.6 trillion km). A black hole is an entity of such density and gravitational strength that nothing -- not even light -- can escape from its grasp. Because it doesn't reflect light, a black hole cannot be seen and can only be detected by measuring the motion of stars, gas and dust nearby. The theory that a black hole exists in the center of the Milky Way -- the galaxy in which Earth is located -- has long been controversial, and many astronomers have rejected previous evidence supporting such a theory. But researchers at Wednesday's news conference said the latest data bolsters the idea of a black hole because that is the best explanation for their findings. Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used radio telescopes to make independent measurements of the motion of the object at the center of the galaxy. They found that it stood relatively still compared to the rest of the galaxy -- which is consistent with a black hole. Another team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany found that thousands of stars existed in the area around the black hole, zipping around in tight circles. In order to cause stars to move that quickly, the black hole would have to have 2.6 million times as much mass as our sun. Many of the stars zipping around Sagittarius A are old -- "a retirement village for stars," says Eckart -- suggesting that the black hole grows more and more massive by sucking in stars over the eons and eventually swallowing them. Astronomers also unveiled evidence of another unusual black hole, nicknamed Old Faithful, about 40,000 light years from Earth. Old Faithful, more powerful the Sagittarius A, sucks matter into a doughnut-like disk, then ejects it in eruptions that throw out an amount of material as massive as Mount Everest at a speed of more than 171,000 miles per second (274,000 km per second.) "It's incredibly violent," said Steven Eikenberry of the California Institute of Technology. "We're talking about something that is trillions of times the annual energy output of the United States." And when the black hole is active, these eruptions take place in consistent 30-minute intervals. Those regular eruptions led NASA scientists to nickname the black hole after the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, which also erupts regularly. Reporter Rick Lockridge and Reuters contributed to this report.

I really appreciate your posting that article, Ginny. I kept missing it and forgetting to look it up. Now it is here...! You cannot imagine how happy I am in this little conference of mine lately. My favorite stuff being discussed by the greatest posters anywhere. Mahalo nui loa!

Today in Space 4 Mar 2000 Aurora Watch: An increase in geomagnetic activity levels could occur late today in response to a glancing blow from recent coronal mass ejections (CMEs) associated with the M6 and X1-class flares observed on March 2. A direct hit is not likely since neither of these CMEs were observed as a halo event. Solar activity has subsided since late in the day on March 3 (Universal Time). Nevertheless, the large sunspot groups 8891 and 8882 have complicated beta-gamma magnetic fields, which makes them likely sites for solar flares. 8891 is stll close to the center of the solar disk. Flares or coronal mass ejections from that region will likely be directed toward Earth.

Will that show up on photos?

Chcek http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/restricted/read/geo/24.41 You can see the holes in the solar disk as brighter places where the cooler exterior were blown away. The entire discussion is fascinating and available: http://www.spaceweather.com/

Solar prominences are visible on photographs as streams of hot gases looping over the solar disk. Mostly, however, they are hightly charged particles which get to Earth and not visible until they get to the ionosphere where they cause Auroral displays. Look skyward these next few evenings!

Space Science News for March 5, 2000 Residents of Canada and the northern United States should be on the alert for aurora borealis during the night of March 5 and morning of March 6. The best time to view aurorae is usually around local midnight. Tonight's new moon will make even faint activity easy to see. Early on March 5, 2000, the interplanetary magnetic field in the vicinity of Earth developed a significant southward-directed component. This condition often means that solar wind plasma can penetrate Earth's magnetosphere and trigger auroral activity. Data from NOAA's polar orbiting meteorological satellites late on March 5 show an expanded auroral oval. If this high level of activity continues, auroral displays could be visible as far south as the Great Lakes states and in New England. For continuing coverage of aurora and all forms of space weather, please visit http://www.SpaceWeather.com

Space Science News for March 9, 2000 New pictures from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft show exotic terrain made of dry ice near the Red Planet's south pole. Differences between the north and south poles suggest that the opposite ends of Mars have had divergent climates for thousands or perhaps even millions of years. FULL STORY at Martian Swiss Cheese

Propagation Forecast Bulletin 10 There was a nice surprise for participants in last weekend's DX contest. ARLB009 predicted stormy geomagnetic conditions, but it turned out that the energy from solar eruptions did not affect the earth's geomagnetic field. Instead of the predicted planetary A indices of 12, 28 and 25 for Friday through Sunday, the A index for those days was 5, 5 and 7, which is very quiet. Solar flux was 189, 167 and 181. Average solar flux was about the same last week as the week before, and average sunspot numbers were slightly lower. Average A indices have also been lower. Solar flux is expected to dip below 200 this weekend. Predicted flux values for Friday through Tuesday are 200, 195, 190, 185 and 180. Solar flux is expected to bottom out around 150 on March 17 or 18, then rise above 200 by March 23 and stay around 220 from March 25 to April 4. Geomagnetic indices are expected to remain quiet until March 22-23, then settle down again until March 31 and April 1. We are moving toward the spring equinox, which always means better HF conditions, especially with the rising solar flux. Look for more frequent worldwide openings on 10, 12 and 15 meters. Cable News Network has an email service which delivers weekly space news, and some of it concerns solar activity of interest to hams. The email service sends URL links to articles, such as the one at http://CNN.com/2000/TECH/space/03/01/sunspots/index.html. You can subscribe at http://cnn.com/EMAIL. In the mail this week was an interesting tip from a ham in Vermont, who wrote, ''This is Zach Manganello, K1ZK, I am a freshman at Middlebury College, and I just attended a lecture that I thought was absolutely fascinating, pertinent to HF propagation, and worthy of sharing with you at the ARRL. The lecture was about the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN), and these scientists have giant radar arrays at several locations near the Earth's poles which they use to study interaction of solar radiation with the Earth's geosphere and ionosphere. Check out their web site at http://superdarn.jhuapl.edu ''. NASA Space Science News has an item this week about predicting disturbances by seeing what is happening on the other side of the sun that faces away from earth. This uses the Michelson Doppler Imager on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, on the web at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast09mar_1.htm . This is important because solar forecasts for the short term are based on calculating when known active regions will rotate back into view. If activity can be observed on the far side of the sun, then more accurate forecasts can be made which are not dependent on the last glimpse of the active region before it rotated out of view. Finally, check out http://www.solarmax2000.com/, a site devoted to this year's peak in solar activity. Sunspot numbers for March 2 through 8 were 209, 189, 167, 181, 172, 164 and 212 with a mean of 184.9. 10.7 cm flux was 213.2 203.8, 200.2, 220.3, 222.4, 221.8 and 214.9, with a mean of 213.8, and estimated planetary A indices were 8, 5, 5, 7, 11, 16 and 13, with a mean of 9.3.

Space Science News for March 10, 2000 NASA's durable Galileo spacecraft is joining forces with Saturn-bound Cassini on a mission to study Jupiter's magnetosphere -- the biggest thing in the solar system. How big is it? If Jupiter's magnetosphere were visible, it would appear to be larger than the Sun or Moon in spite of its great distance from Earth. This story also includes plasma wave sounds recorded by Galileo in 1996 as it sailed past Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede. Galileo will swing past Ganymede two more times before the end of 2000.FULL STORY at The Biggest Thing in the Solar System

I'm gonna start putting these Space science notices in Geosites for Kids - Geo 15. More people will see them as they are linked the parents conference.

It's all his fault: On This Date in History: March 13 In 1781, the distant planet Uranus was discovered by British

astronomer William Herschel.

Blame it on Herschel. It was all because he had a classical education. There were already the planets Jupiter and Saturn, so that led to Uranus, the grandfather and father of them respectively in mythology.

Not only that...he was of the same school as Handel and was German born, as well. He went to England under the tutilage of the Hanoverian kings as did Handel. German engineering again...and glorious music, too. Fortunately the Titan-planets did not devour their own children - or did they?

I shall ask Alexander how Uranus is pronounced in German...it might just give us a new slant on the sound of the name in question!

I don't know if the Titan planets tried to devour their children. Maybe they did, which might explain why they all have rings. Of course, none can compare with Saturn's ring system. Uranus (the Sky) in Greek mythology was the consort to Gaia (the Earth) which gave birth to the Titans.

Ah...yes! I was slightly ahead of myself with Uranus. I can still see Blake's woodcut (was it? or etching?) of Saturn devouring his children...terrifying. Interesting that Earth is the only one who supposedly spawned her own moon rather than devouring it.

...or am I seriously confused on this Monday in particular?! Going to look up the artwork and will post it when I find it...

It was etching by Blake. There is also a painting by Goya of the same subject. Old Goya had a bit of bizarre sense of humor; the Saturn devouring his children painting hung in Goya's dining room.

Thank you! I was about to do some serious brain revamping. Yuck! What a painting to hang in your dining room. Bet his kids behaved! Thanks, Cheryl - don't even think of not posting in here - I cannot possibly remember everything and I need you! *hugs*

You're too kind. I knew those art history courses would be useful someday.

My Bullfinch is in the other room. Saturn was not a Titan, I guess...?

You might be right. I thought he was though, Gaia and Uranus gave birth to the Titans. Among the Titans were Rhea and Chronos (Saturn) who gave birth to the Olympian gods. The brothers Zeus (Jupiter), Poseidon (Neptune), and Hades (Pluto) divided the rule of all creation among themselves. Hades got the Underworld, (talk about a bum deal), Poseidon got dominion of the Seas, (not to shabby), and Zeus got the Sky, because he was the oldest and got everyone else out of Chronos's tummy.

Right!!! Now I remember. Mahalo nui loa!

Space Science News for March 13, 2000 With a little help from the Sun, NASA's NEAR spacecraft has spotted a telltale x-ray glow from elements on asteroid Eros. Scientists discussed that and other accomplishments at a press conference today. FULL STORY at One month around asteroid Eros

Yes, Kronos and Rhea were Titans (there were 12 in all), but Zeus was the youngest of their children. Rhea hid Zeus from Kronos because she was tired of losing all her children as soon as they were born. She even helped Zeus overthrow Kronos. It's an interesting succession. Uranus was overthrown by his son, Kronos, who in turn was overthrown by his son, Zeus. What a lovely bunch of gods to worship!! It's a wonder the ancient Greeks didn't kill themselves in despair...

Since you are the resident Greek person, did not the ancients like gods to whom they could relate, so along with the divinity, they gave them the same shortcomings we have, as well. Made them less fearsome - until you angered them. I think most of the worship was spent appeasing them rather than worhshipping as we do in OT / NT religions. (Please correct me if this analysis is off base!)

Right Ginny, Zeus was the youngest, I don't know why I thought him the oldest Titan. As the Greeks became more sophistocated many of the most educated ceased to believe in their own religion by classical times. Pythagoras formulated his own religion based on -- what else -- geometry.

Space Science News for March 15, 2000 What do asteroids and cosmic gamma-ray bursts have in common? NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft is helping astronomers learn more about both. The gamma-ray spectrometer on NEAR -- designed to study the elements of asteroid Eros -- helped pinpoint an an unusual gamma-ray burst on March 1st. Now, telescopes around the world are tracking the explosion's afterglow. This could be the first of many high-energy discoveries during NEAR's one-year mission to Eros. FULL STORY at Gamma-ray bursts are NEAR MORE GAMMA-RAY NEWS: The NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center reports that amateur astronomers have imaged the optical afterglow from the gamma-ray burst detected by NEAR on March 1, 2000. In collaboration with the AAVSO, NASA plans to organize a global network of amateurs to monitor gamma-ray burst fireballs. FULL STORY atAmateurs catch a gamma-ray burst

Space Science News for March 16, 2000 Fragments of a meteor that exploded over the Yukon in January, 2000, have been collected and turned over to Canadian and NASA scientists for analysis. The find is potentially the most important recovery of a rock from space in at least 31 years. FULL STORY at Yukon meteorite recovered! ---

The last time a carbonaceous chondrite was quickly recovered after its fall to Earth was September 28, 1969 near Murchison, Australia. The Murchison meteorite, pictured here, has fascinated students of life's origins since 1970, when investigators discovered that the rock is rich in amino acids and other complex organic compounds.

I did read today that the meteorite fragments found in the Yukon was causing some excitement because they thought they might have been formed before the solar system - am I right?

Not sure, Anne, but I shall investigate at the url above. If I am not mistaken, most, if not all meteorites which land on Earth are debris left over from the formation of the Solar System. Let me check! Propagation Forecast Bulletin 11 Average solar flux was down slightly and average sunspot numbers rose over the past week. There were no really disturbed days, but the geomagnetic field was active on March 12. The spring equinox is coming up this Monday, and this is always an exciting time for HF operators. Conditions should be good this season with the rising solar flux. Solar flux has been declining this week, and is expected to reach a short term minimum near 170 from March 19 to 21. Flux values should quickly rise to another short term peak that is expected to be very broad. Solar flux should be around 220 from March 25 through April 4. The projected solar flux for the next five days, Friday through Tuesday, is 180, 175, 170, 170 and 170. Planetary A index for these same days is expected to be 8, 8, 8, 8 and 12. Upcoming dates that may be disturbed are March 22-24, March 31 and April 1, and April 18 and 19. Chip, K7JA, wrote to alert readers to fantastic conditions on 10 meters, including long path propagation. He is in Southern California, and writes ''You might want to mention in your column the tremendous LP openings on 10 meters lately. Saturday night of ARRL Phone was one, and last night (perhaps 0300z to 0800z at least, out here, earlier on Right Coast) was a doozy. The band started over the top into UA9, etc., and about 0300z went to Long Path. Loud UA9s, 3B8FG, JY9NX, A41LZ, A45XR, 5Z4WI, SU9ZZ, and stations from literally everywhere in Europe (like PA, DL, OH etc.) filled the band. I gave up at midnight, but the band was still hopping. The East Coast got into this one, as did stations in Texas and other Midwestern areas. I saw a number of spots by W3UR. Basically, about 7 PM is a good time to be watchful to the south, beaming about 90 degrees. Last night's opening, however, had a broad peak into Europe, maybe as far up as 220 degrees or so. Guess we finally have a sunspot cycle!'' Sunspot numbers for March 9 through 15 were 225, 231, 178, 188, 172, 193 and 167 with a mean of 193.4. 10.7 cm flux was 205.8 203.4, 203.2, 203.2, 188.1, 182.6 and 177.8, with a mean of 194.9, and estimated planetary A indices were 5, 10, 12, 19, 4, 6 and 3, with a mean of 8.4.

Saw (some of ) a fascinating programme on planets beyond the solar system last night. Trouble was I fell asleep watching it so I didn't make any notes. Sorry!

*sigh* Will they do reruns?! planets BEYOND the solar system?! Gotta see that one, for sure!

re: .155 & .156 Marcia, I agree with your analysis. The ancient Greeks believed in the notion of "hubris", which was basically pride, insolence, and general defiance of the gods. Anyone who angered the gods was sure to be punished. Many of the myths involved mortals who ran afoul of the gods (Sisyphus, Tantalus, Arachne, Andromeda, Phaethon... to name a few). Cheryl, I haven't really studied the downfall of the ancient Greek religion, but it makes sense that the philosophers and scientists would be the first ones to stop believing. Wasn't Socrates put to death for being a non-believer and speaking against the pagan gods? I'll have to look that one up.

I think Socrates was charged with impiety leading up to his trial. One of the main charges at the trial which culminated in his being sentenced to death was corrupting the youth of Athens. Socrates advocated moral philosophy over blind adherence to religion. Most of the Greek philosophers, Socrates among them, espooused a rational vision of the universe. Their belief was that the intellectual component of human nature was the most important. The force of truth was examplified by reason. Even if a person desired to do otherwise, his reason (the force of truth) would force him to accept the logical conclusions. The historical context of Socrates trial should be considered. He was tried in the years just after Athens had lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta. Democracy in Athens was overthrown, and the Spartans enstated an oligarchy of 30 tyrants to rule over Athens. Socrates was viewed as a threat to public order by undermining the moral conventions of the city and brought to public trial at the age of 70. The fact that he led a private life and chose not to be concerned with Athenian politics was to his detriment. He served only when called upon. Although he held full rights of Athenian citizenship for 40 years, he never took it upon himself to take on public service. Socrates himself claimed that he wished to preserve his own moral principles, therefore took no interest in politics. This did not sit well with the Athenians. The Athenian leader Pericles stated at his funeral oration at the time of the outset of the Peloponnesion War: ...this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say he has no business here at all. Not only did Socrates harbor what might construed as a disdain for democracy; he also held indiosyncratic and unconventional views of the gods. He was critical and questioning in his view of religion. He was as well interested in the new knowlege of philosophers, since referred to as the presocratics. They believed in natural theories for the existence of the cosmos. To them reality could be explained by the movement of matter or the recombination of elements. One of the best known of these natural philosophers was Anaxagoras, for whom Socrates accused his critics of mistaking him. Socrates accusers seem to have thought him quilty of doing the same inquiring into the domains of the gods, into things below the earth and sky. Which brings us back to the title of this topic: Beyond Planet Earth. Remember what Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

As an aside, Wasn't Socrates convicted of Corruption of the Nation's Youth?! How terribly modern that sounds and how nasty the inplication nowadays!

Space Science News for March 19, 2000 As the Sun sets at the south pole on March 20, 2000, Earth will join two other planets in the solar system where it is northern Spring. FULL STORY at Sunset at the South Pole

Yes, Marcia that was the offence for which Socrates was convicted. What is interesting is that in the later Hellenistic culture and the Roman Empire the Socratic Method was deemed the proper method for education. This entailed requiring the student to argue both sides of a topic.

Today is Monday, March 20, the 80th day of 2000 with 286 to follow. Spring begins today in the Northern Hemisphere at 2:35 a.m. EST. The moon is waning, moving toward its last quarter. The morning stars are Mercury and Venus. The evening stars are Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Indeed - and until one understands both sides of the subject in question, one cannot know the truth about it! Still as relevant today as it was then!

Space dust disappears into black holes. British astronomers have found that black holes at the centre of galaxies get bigger with age by consuming dust and gas. The first evidence of black hole appetites was found by astronomers at Nottingham and Birmingham universities who compared the ages of galaxies with the dark mass at their centres. The older the galaxy, the bigger the b. The astronomers determoined the age of 23 galaxies, concluding that some were as young as four billion and others as old as 12 billion years. "One of the basic properties of a black hole is that material can fall into it, but can't get out" professor Merrifield of Nottingham University, said. The findings will be presented next week at a conference in Oxford, and published in the Monthly notices of the royal Astronomical Society, next month. See http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzmrm/blackhole.html

Maggie's Black hole picture:

Interesting story and incredible picture. I wish I could have dared to post the enlarged one but thought it better for Terry's bandwidth that I make a smaller version for posting here. Thanks, Maggie - Fantastic stuff!

That didn't come out too badly did it, considering it came from a newspaper! (the size above was the size it came up on my screen, didn't realise it sent as larger - still sorting that out!). Still can't figure how to put that in myself if it's from my computer.

It is probably better that you send the biggest possible one and let me downsize it. It has worked well so far on Geo and other places I have posted images. You did an excellent scanning job. I am envious of your talents and Wolfie's as well. Guess I'm just gonna have to take the plunge and get one, too.

The graphic you are posting must first be on the internet, not just your home computer. After I downsized your image, I ftp'd it to Spring's hard drive (hosts have space allotted to them for such things). From there I got the image location by accessing my webspace url then did the command string to post it. Simple, once you've done it a few dozen times *grin* but I still occasionally mess it up...*sigh*

Mine's only a cheapy (�49). I got it to scan academic text documents - I've got a pretty nifty text scan programme that does really well. But it's doing pretty well on pics too now I've sussed the right settings. Trouble is I can't run the scanner and zip drive at the same time, and it's complicated to change the wires round.

Hmmm...there is not a splitter available like an extension cord with several outlets on the end?! I am afraid I am going to have that same problem!

I've also run out of plug space on my extension lead. Under my desk looks like some kind of geek's paradise! Mind you the top doesn't look much better. Yes, I'm off to have my bath now - don't nag!

LOL...is there a cyber knee-hole which is not filled with extensions and plugs and such?! If there are, they are not trying hard enough - and my feet are atop my tool box under there, too! The top is hopeless. As soon as one project gets done another takes its place....*sigh*

Space Science News for March 22, 2000 The Earth's magnetosphere is being buffeted by high-speed solar wind particles from a coronal hole straddling the center of the Sun's disk. The solar wind velocity has increased from 350 to 600 km/s during the past 12 hours. Follow the action at http://www.spaceweather.com MORE SPACE SCIENCE NEWS: #1 Curiouser and Curiouser: The exotic world of gamma-ray astronomy has taken yet another surprising turn with the revelation that half the previously unidentified high-energy gamma ray sources in our own galaxy actually comprise a new class of mysterious objects. FULL STORY at http://spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast23mar_1m.htm #2 Solar Cycle Update: Is the real Y2K problem just starting? The solar cycle appears to be on schedule for a peak in mid-2000. FULL STORY at http://spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast22mar_1m.htm

Henceforth Space Science News will be posted in http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/restricted/read/news/36 This will enable a wider readership. For some reason surfers avoid Geo like it was a deadly disease. Suggestion?

Propagation Forecast Bulletin 12 Spring is here, and 10 and 12 meters are the place to be. A high solar flux and shifting seasons are again producing conditions where low power mobiles can work the world on the highest HF bands. Last year at this time, the average solar flux for the week was 147.5. This week it was 207.8, much higher, and almost 13 points higher than last week's average. A steady upward recent trend can be seen in the graph at http://www.dxlc.com/solar/. Geomagnetic indices have been quite low, but this should change. Active conditions are predicted for the next few days due to recurring coronal holes and some recent flare activity. A large coronal hole that has been returning for several months has split into three groups, and one of them crosses the sun's equator and is well positioned for disturbing radio conditions here on earth. Weekend conditions for the CQ Worldwide WPX Phone Contest could be stormy. The predicted planetary A index for the next five days, Friday through Tuesday, is 25, 30, 20, 10 and 10, so it looks like the best contest conditions may be on Sunday. On March 31 and April 1 conditions may be unsettled or active again, but should be quiet until April 18. Solar flux predicted for the next five days is 230, 240, 245, 245 and 235. Flux values are expected to bottom out around 185 on April 12 or 13, then peak near 250 around April 22 or 23. The High-Energy Solar Spectrograph Imager mission was set back at least six months when the satellite was mistakenly vibrated too hard in a test on a shake table at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The deployment of the satellite, which is designed to observe solar flares in their most energetic wavelengths, was expected to coincide with the solar maximum this year. You can read about the accident at http://www.msnbc.com/news/386019.asp?0a=23232C5 and about the HESSI mission itself at the NASA web site http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/hessi/index.html and at a University of California site, http://hessi.ssl.berkeley.edu/. Sunspot numbers for March 16 through 22 were 138, 152, 142, 208, 240, 191 and 212 with a mean of 183.3. 10.7 cm flux was 184.4, 192.4, 194.8, 208.2, 210.3, 230.5 and 233.8, with a mean of 207.8, and estimated planetary A indices were 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 6 and 11, with a mean of 7.1.

How to persuade the others to look. Is the Sun sexy! or something like that - difficult and a shame because it is all so interesting.

Sex definitly sells and attracts attention. Oh well, I posted something in Porch where more people will see it. Today I posted the Discovery Channel Online in Geosites for Kids (Geo 15) with the schedule of good things to watch on the telly this week on their channel. I hope others see it. I'll put it in each Saturday hoping....!

NASA is now concerned about how to avoid showering the earth with huge shards of red-hot metal. The space agency announced this weekend that it is to crash-land a satellite the size of a railway engine in the Pacific Ocean to prevent it from spiralling out of control perhaps onto an inhabited area. The Compton gamma ray observatory studies mysterious natural explosions in space. Scientists had desperately tried to save it as no other instrument gives such good insight into the highest energy parts of the spectrum, where most energetic events in the universe show themselves. Last week NASA confirmed that it had suffered a catastrophic failure in one three gyroscopes that keep it pointing the right way. As it was deemed too expensive to send up a space shuttle to repair it, NASA scientists now plan to use Compton�s remaining fuel to bring it down in a controlled descent in June. If they did not, NASA admitted, the satellite would veer off course, lose its balance and fall more than 100 miles to earth. It is so big that large chinks of metal would not burn up, like most space debris, but would land with the force of a substantial meteorite. This has happened before in 1979 when the Skylab station was being decommissioned and spread burning debris across Australia. (The Times, 26.3.2000)

I glad John sent in that thing about time. i saw that and then lost it and could'nt find it again.

What did John send in? Did I miss something? Yikes!!! More debris heading for us out in the Pacific (which is very large until you start talking about something from space...)

I'm sure i didn't imagine it, but i can't see it. it was about space time continuum and time reversal. Maybe I've gone mad!

No...it is there somewhere. Hmmmm...I just might have to look it up again. I would ask him but he is currently doing a midnight to 6am shift as production manager at the station as well as taping the 6 hour morning show he does daily, and tomorrow through Saturday he will be also doing Play-by-play baseball games for UHHilo - one televised, as well - from Kona. Poor dear is not all that fit and I am more than a little concerned about it. He needs as much rest as he can get so I do not bother him with email during weeks like this.

I was sure i saw it as I scrolled through. then it had disappeared. (Humpy noises coming from off stage. Gotta go. probably offline for a coupla days. Bye)

Bye!!! Good luck, Dear!

Space Weather News for March 29-30, 2000 Aurora Watch: Skywatchers in northern Europe, Canada, Alaska, and the northermost tier of US states could be treated to a display of aurora borealis tonight thanks to elevated levels of geomagnetic activity late in the day on March 29. Also today, the SOHO spacecraft captured beautiful images of a full-halo coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun. Full-halo CMEs are massive bubbles of hot gas headed either directly toward or away from Earth. This one appears to have erupted on the back side of the Sun and is proceeding away from our planet. Details on both are available at http://www.spaceweather.com

If this image updates you will be able to watch the aurora wax and wane from http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html This plot shows the current extent and position of the auroral oval in the northern hemisphere, extrapolated from measurements taken during the most recent polar pass of the NOAA POES satellite. The yellow, clock-like, arrow in the plot points toward the noon meridian. The statistical pattern depicting the auroral oval is appropriate to the auroral activity level determined from the power flux observed during the most recent polar satellite pass. The power fluxes in the statistical pattern are color coded on a scale from 0 to 10 ergs .cm-2.sec-1 according to the color bar on the right. The pattern has been oriented with respect to the underlying geographic map using the current universal time, updated every ten minutes. This presentation provides an estimate of the location, extent, and intensity of aurora on a global basis. For example, the presentation gives a guide to the possibility that the aurora is located near a given location in the northern hemisphere under the conditions that existed at the time of the most recent polar satellite pass.

Mauna Kea team finds the smallest planets yet beyond our solar system By Gregg K. Kakesako Star-Bulletin Two more planets -- which may be smaller in mass than Saturn -- have been discovered by scientists at W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in the hunt for extra-solar planets. The latest planets are far smaller than the planets that have previously been found orbiting suns beyond our solar system. Saturn, the sixth planet in our solar system, is about nine times wider than Earth, but has only one-third the mass of its neighbor Jupiter. Of the 30 planets previously found around stars like Earth's sun, all have been Jupiter-sized or larger. The finding was made by Geoff Marcy of San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley; Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; and Steve Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz, using the 10-meter Keck I telescope. In a written statement, Marcy said that searching for planets orbiting distant stars is "like looking at a beach from a distance." "Previously we only saw the large boulders, which were Jupiter-sized planets or larger," he said. "Now we are seeing the 'rocks,' Saturn-sized planets or smaller." Sighting Earth-sized objects, said Marcy, would be like seeing pebbles on that beach. Astronomers are not yet able to do that. One planet, with at least 80 percent the mass of Saturn, is orbiting 3.8 million miles from the star HD-46375, 109 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. Another planet, with 70 percent of Saturn's mass, was found 32.5 million miles from the star 79 Ceti (HD16141), 117 light years away in the constellation Cetus. The planets are presumably gas giants, the scientists say, made mostly of primordial hydrogen and helium, rather than the rocky materials that make up Earth. They orbit so close to their parent stars that they are extremely hot and not conducive to life. The planet orbiting 79 Ceti has an average temperature of 1,530 degrees; while the planet orbiting HD46375 has an average temperature of 2,070 degrees. The planets probably formed at a farther distance from the star, the scientists say, where they accumulated cool gas and then migrated into their present orbits. Discovery of the Saturn-sized planets, however, supports a theory that planets such as those in Earth's solar system formed around many stars in the universe. It also supports the theory that most planets are relatively small, such as Earth, Mars and Venus. The planets are not actually seen by astronomers. Instead, they measure the gravitational effect of planets on their star. As a planet orbits, it causes the star to wobble very slightly. By measuring this wobble, scientists can detect the presence and size of a planet. Astronomers have used this technique to catalog at least 21 extrasolar planets. The group is searching some 1,100 stars within 300 light-years of Earth to find evidence of planets. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year in a vacuum, about 6 trillion miles. Other astronomy groups are also searching and have found additional extrasolar planets.

found the above article on msn today but you beat me to it *wink*

I got it almost straight from the source...then Honolulu newspaper. The telescope mentioned (the Keck) is visible atop Mauna Kea from my yard!

NASA Science News for March 30, 2000 Next Thursday, April 6, three planets and the thin crescent Moon are going to put on a memorable sky show when the quartet converge inside a circle 9 degrees across. The grouping is just the prelude to a grander alignment of planets on May 5, 2000. Is doom at hand, as many mystics assert? Find out by reading the FULL STORY at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast30mar_1m.htm Planets for Dessert Also, for kids and kids-at-heart, a younger person's version of this article is available at the NASA Kids web site: http://kids.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2000/news-planetalign.asp?se The Planets Line Up

NASA Science News for April 1, 2000 On April Fools Day, 2000, NASA researchers are questioning the fate of five high-flying sweet treats that disappeared after a meteor balloon flight in April 1999. FULL STORY at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast01apr_1m.htm

greatMarcoa - my imagination is in overdrive!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry Marcia a misprint

OK, those missing Peeps must be the ones I have been consuming under an disguise. Mine were yellow. If I had just known they were hiding the pink so they would not be discovered, I wouls have left the alone. It's all my fault. Actually, I have saved one to grow to adulthood amd make me some more Peeps for next year!

Sheesh! Hard to tell I am just waking up and not typing very well. Sorry for the mistakes in that last post...I tried erasing my screen but all I have to show for my efforts is smear!

NASA Science News for April 3, 2000 Like blood pulsing in an artery, newly discovered currents of gas beat deep inside the Sun, speeding and slackening every 16 months. The solar "heartbeat" throbs in the same region of the Sun suspected of driving the 11-year cycle of solar eruptions. Scientists are hopeful that this pulse can help them unravel the origin and operation of the solar cycle. FULL STORY at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast03apr_1m.htm

Next Thursday, April 6, three planets and the thin crescent Moon are going to put on a memorable sky show when the quartet converge inside a circle just 9 degrees across. "It's going to be beautiful," says Vince Huegele, a researcher at the NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center. "And best of all, you won't need a telescope to see it, just your naked eye." Right: Duane Hilton's rendering of the April 6 planetary get-together as seen above Bryce Canyon in Utah. To admire the display, simply go outside after dinner on April 6 and look toward the southwest sky. Around 8 p.m. local daylight savings time the slender crescent moon will be easy to spot about 30 degrees above the horizon. The brightest nearby "star" will be Jupiter. At magnitude -2.1, the giant planet is 8 times brighter than Saturn, which glows pale yellow less than 3 degrees west of the Moon. Mars will lie a scant 1.1 degrees north of Jupiter. The red planet (magnitude 1.4) will be about 3 times fainter than Saturn (magnitude 0.3). Although the planets and our Moon will appear to be close together, there's no danger of a collision. While the Moon is only 384,000 km away from us this week, Mars is 349 million km away; Jupiter is 875 million km away; and Saturn is a whopping 1493 million km distant. When it comes to the sky, appearances can be deceiving! Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn will appear to be even closer together on April 15 when the three will fit inside a circle less than 5 degrees across. That's the most compact grouping of any 3 planets for the entire year. Nevertheless, the display on April 6 will be more beautiful thanks to the delicate crescent Moon as it passes by the trio. But wait, there's even more: Cradled in the arms of the crescent Moon will appear the ghostly outline of the full Moon, a dim glow that astronomers call "Earthshine." Like all the planets we see in the night sky, the Moon shines because of reflected sunlight. The side of the Moon facing the sun shines brightly, and the side facing away is nearly dark. The only significant illumination on the "dark side of the Moon" is due to Earthshine -- sunlight that bounces off the Earth and falls on the lunar surface. A slender crescent Moon with Earthshine is widely regarded as one of the most delicate and beautiful sights in the night sky. It will be difficult to see from urban areas, but should be easy to view from dark sky locations. Duane Hilton's rendering of the April 6 planetary get-together as seen above Bryce Canyon in Utah.

And...a reprise of April 6th lunar eclipse - one photo I did not have posted because the moon was too small in it...but I still love it. Total Lunar Eclipse Fairfield, California August 6, 1999 David Little

Please post your comments on whether or not you were able to see the alignment this evening, please.

the lunar pic is great and i saw the alignment, wouldn't have known they were planets without having read this post first!

I posted it in the News conference topic I created which I would like to have linked to Geo called Space News. I try to double post if it is important enough. You gonna see it? A friend in Maine just reported cloudy skies. No aurora for him, either. Looks clear to the east, but where this is gonna be is under several layers of thick clouds. Gotta get you outside some time and teach you constellations. You'd know in a flash that those bright objects did not belong there normally.

how did they look, woofie???

i usually see one star next to the moon but because the proximity of these weren't as close as i'd imagined, i wouldn't have thought differently. jupiter is the brightest, then saturn, then mars. am gonna go out and look as it gets darker. (they were in the western sky, doesn't the moon rise in the east?)

At new moon the moon rises at sunrise and sets at sunset and we cannot see it. It rises an hour later each night (actually more like 55 minutes)until half way thorough its cycle it is full and rising at sunset and setting at sunrise. Oh yeah! Everything rises in the East because we are actually rotating west to east and we make them look that way.

right, but this crescent moon was low in the western sky and rising towards the east.

Not rising, sweetie. Look at it again. It should be setting.

you are sooooo right! *grin* see what happens when it gets darker later? i was wondering why you were saying the moon sets when the sun sets due to the changing rising hour each day!! i got it *laugh*

Yippee!!! Pleases me as much as it does you -if not more- because you were interested enough to notice!

Can you see the old moon in the new moon's arms tonight?

yes. i've always been able to see that.

if you look at it and kinda screw up your eyes (try not to focus directly), you can tell that the moon is round (and not just a disc in the sky)!!

Yup! The bright part of the moon is reflecting the sun's light (we are shading the rest) and the shaded part is illuminated by earth shine!!!

yup. my mom used to tell me it was a reflection of earth and so i thought the land-looking shapes on the moon was a result of the earth (it makes no sense, but as a kid, i didn't either)...she was probably trying to explain to me the different phases of the moon but i took her literally. if they told me the moon was made of cheese, probably would've believed that too *smile*

Make that AMERICAN cheese...there is a flag up there to prove it *grin* Kids always have interesting ways of interpreting what we say...that's why I really like talking to kids. I learn more than they do!

Okay I looked but unfortunately in Western Australia it was still light when the moon was going down and I could only see what I though was Venus, the other planets would not have shown up. Even so it was still an unusual sight. Setting sun, and a crescent moon. I was sad to miss the spectacle.

There are thick, charcoal grey clouds backed up on the mountain. That is all I will be seeing this evening. Tomorrow they should not be all that farther apart. It will be interesting to see how they move in comparison with each other over the next few nights. We are all orbiting the sun so it should make a good thing to sketch each evening to compare. (I do that sort of thing...!)

Response 15 of 15: Marcia (MarciaH) * Fri, Apr 7, 2000 (12:16) * 11 lines NASA Science News for April 7, 2000 Subject: Geomagnetic Storm A major geomagnetic storm hit our planet on Thursday after an interplanetary shock wave passed by Earth on April 6, 2000. Displays of aurora borealis were spotted in Europe, Asia, Canada, Alaska and in the continental US as far south as North Carolina. The storm appears to be subsiding, but forecasters note that more aurorae might be visible Friday night. FULL STORY at http://spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast07apr_2m.htm

from msnmembers news: April 10 � Astronomers around the world are focusing on a mysterious pulsing light in the Big Dipper, trying to figure out whether it�s a newly active black hole or a neutron star. One of the strangest things about it is its location, observers say. THE OBJECT, known as XTE J1118+480, was first spotted March 29 by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a satellite that monitors the sky in X-ray wavelengths. At that time, the mystery object was in the midst of a rapid brightening in X-rays. Ron Remillard, a Rossi research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put out an alert that brought confirmation of the pulsing source within an hour, from Japanese astronomers. In the days since then, the object�s rise and fall has been charted by the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment, a full-sky telescope set up at Los Alamos, N.M., to track quick-changing phenomena like the pulsing light. The ROTSE team reviewed previous data and found that the object brightened and dimmed in a four-hour cycle, building up to peaks in January and March. �Before this recent work, nothing about XTE J1118+480 was known to any branch of astronomy,� Remillard told MSNBC. Just a few days of analysis have shed a lot more light on the mystery, leading Remillard to remark that �it�s not entirely a mystery anymore.� He and other astronomers believe that the source is either a black hole, a collapsed star so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational grip; or a neutron star, a compact remnant that�s only slightly less dense than a black hole. In either case, the outburst isn�t coming from the object itself, but from dust and gas that�s heated to an explosive glow as it�s sucked toward the object, Remillard explained. "We get these X-ray novae that pop up when matter starts flowing from a companion star into a black hole or in some cases a neutron star,� he said. As that companion star swings around the more massive object, it may block out some of the emissions from the outburst, accounting for the variations in brightness, he said. What�s particularly interesting about this source is that it has cropped up high above the galactic plane, where most of the action is, he said. Astronomers haven�t yet figured out how far away the source is, but Remillard speculated that the object is a long-dormant black hole that has just become active in the halo of stars surrounding the denser disk of our Milky Way galaxy. �If you had a black hole forming way back then in a binary (star system), it just may have occasion to reawaken every once in a while, and we just happened to catch it,� he said. ROTSE researcher Tim McKay of the University of Michigan said the pulsing object might also turn out to be much closer to our celestial neighborhood. �Either of these solutions would be a little bit odd,� he said. Whatever it is, XTE J1118+480 is currently under close watch by astronomers ranging from backyard amateurs to investigators with the Hubble Space Telescope. But skywatchers shouldn�t expect to see the source with the naked eye: Its peak magnitude of 13 or so brings it within range of a typical 4- to 6-inch (100mm to 150mm) telescope. McKay said the object�s optical brightness appears to increase about a week before its X-ray brightness, which adds to the sense of astronomical mystery. �It may turn out to be not all that exotic,� he said, �but its location suggests that it may be a different thing.� =============== a different thing, hmmm...very technical there. couldn't believe i got to this before you, marcia, sweetie! but my pleasure and enjoy!!

Thanks, Wolfie...now my turn to hunt for things other than the esthetic, which is what has captured my imagination of late. (How about a topic Esthetic Earth or something like that to make a home for the Fine Arts in a place which is so inspiring?!)

I can find nothing and your link does not work...*sigh*

Iridium Program Bankrupt/ Satellites to De-Orbit http://www.drsky.com/ Over the past few years, the Motorola Iridium project had placed a constellation of some 66 earth orbiting satellites, to change the future of cellular communications. The project called for cellular type communications in almost ALL areas of the globe. Now the project is bankrupt and the fate of the satellite "constellation" is up to the push of a few buttons to de-orbit the satellites. For observers on the ground, the Iridium satellites have been something of a rare treat. Seeing a "flare" in the sky as the mirrors on the satellites would glint back at the Earth from space and create a UFO of sorts. "Dr.Sky" has been viewing these Iridium flares for a few years and they are even seen in daylight. Now that the program is ending, why not try and view this relic in the sky for as long as you can. You can visit the Heavens-Above website to get the latest times of passage for the Iridium satellites. All you need to do is enter the information for your local observing city. http://www.heavens-above.com/

that wasn't a purposeful link. anytime i type the word news, it gets hyperlinked. (see, it did it here)

now wait, how come it didn't do it there but everywhere else?

I have had that happen to me, also, but it is usually only when I copy and paste something with that word in it which is NOT necessarily a link. Beats me!

Please check http://www.emergingmind.com/schwa/contest.htm

or this... http://www.jwp.bc.ca/saulm/index.htm

okay joined and voted the planetoid's name as Sagan - an Astronomer I admire - I did think about Fred! as in Sir Fred. Hoyle but that was too silly. After all he was always coming up in the Goon show, Fred I mean.

Oh I don't know Anne, at least Fred's easy to remember. I confuse everyone and call my husband that - his name's Tony! He does goon impressions too - not very well! Tell me about sagan, my education is woefully deficient!

Maggie, did the PBS show called "Cosmos" ever get to Britain. Carl Sagan did the entire thing, and I liked it so well I taped the entire series. "Billions and Billions" of episodes *grin* He is a late US astronomer of rare talents and we all miss him. Sir Fred was my choice. Thought of According to Hoyle but a bridge master took that. Actually, I have been to a live lecture by Sir Fred Hoyle when he visited Hawaii - it was a huge thrill, though I disagreed with a lot of stuff he wrote. Thanks, Anne. How about the Solar System being named Fred? (I also refer to people we both know their names but...as Fred)

April 12, 2000 -- Astronomers from all over the United States and from 10 countries will converge in Huntsville, Alabama today for a series of meetings and lectures. Approximately eighty participants will learn about the latest findings in the field of high-energy astrophysics from a dozen research scientists. Sounds like another dry scientific meeting, right? Wrong. This workshop is the first of its kind devoted to amateur astronomers. The participants -- who will attend lectures by leading researchers in x-ray and gamma-ray astronomy -- are expected to return to their communities and spread the word about high-energy astrophysics in schools, civic forums and clubs. "We selected the attendees in part by asking how they would share their knowledge with others," says Janet Mattei, director of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), which is co-sponsoring the meeting along with the Marshall Space Flight Center. "We got some fantastic responses from astronomy club presidents, planetarium workers, and teachers ... just wonderful responses. There's a real need to bring high-energy astronomy to the attention of the public, and we think these are the right people to do it." But that's not all. Participants will also find out how they can be involved in cutting-edge research along with NASA scientists. "The usual connotation of 'amateur' really doesn't apply here," says NASA/Marshall's Dr. Jerry Fishman, one of the workshop's organizers. "These are dedicated, well-prepared and knowledgeable astronomers who use very sophisticated equipment -- often comparable to professional observatories. Many of them are able to contribute astronomical data used in forefront astronomical research." Monitoring fireballs from gamma-ray bursts and tracking the light curves of variable stars are two areas where amateur data can make an impact, says Fishman. The workshop will touch on those topics and more, ranging from gamma-ray explosions at the edge of the universe to cosmic rays here in the solar system. There will be a special session entitled "Rapid Observations of GRBs by Amateurs" prompted in part by the recent detections of gamma-ray burst afterglows by amateurs. The three-day meeting will conclude on Saturday, April 15 with a lecture by Astronaut Dr. John Grunsfield entitled "The 1999 HST Servicing Mission and Remarks on High Energy Astrophysics." Click for a Preliminary List of Speakers The Invisible, Violent Heavens High energy astrophysics is the study of the most violent events in the universe. Colliding neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), swirling accretion disks around black holes -- these are just a few of the cosmic wonders visible in the x-ray and gamma-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Unfortunately, the short wavelengths where these events shine brightest are inaccessible from Earth because our atmosphere filters out most forms of high-energy radiation. (This is a real nuisance for gamma-ray astronomers, but a good thing for life on our planet!) To study these objects, astronomers use ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma-ray detectors on Earth-orbiting satellites. Satellite-based astronomy was once the exclusive realm of professionals, but that's slowly changing. "Amateurs have been helping scientists with satellite-based research in variable stars since 1975," says Mattei. "For example, when the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (both are orbiting observatories) were scheduled to observe the cataclysmic variable star, SS Cygni, the AAVSO was asked to help. Our members around the world kept a vigil and when the star flared at optical wavelengths we immediately called our professional colleagues." Thanks to the rapid alert, professional astronomers were able to point their satellites at SS Cygni while it was flaring and monitor the enigmatic star at many wavelengths for the first time. "In this particular case everything worked! Optical, x-ray, extreme ultraviolet-- we got it all." This summer scientists will try to observe another outburst from SS Cygni using NASA's newest Great Observatory, the Chandra x-ray telescope. Once again the AAVSO will be called upon to alert professionals that SS Cygni is erupting, says Mattei. Another Glowing Accomplishment.... Performing a feat once reserved for trained professionals, amateurs have lately shown that they too can photograph the faint optical afterglows of distant gamma-ray bursts. The most recent instance was in early March when an amateur astronomy group in Buffalo, NY, recorded the fading fireball from a powerful GRB using a modest 14" telescope and a home-built CCD camera. In January 1999, another amateur used a 24" telescope in New Mexico to record the afterglow from a gamma-ray burst located near the edge of the observable Universe. Right: Nestled 7 arc seconds from a 17th magnitude foreground star, the 20th magnitude afterglow of GRB 000301C is circled in this CCD image from the US Naval Observatory 1m telescope in Flagstaff, AZ. Credit: Arne Henden.The optical afterglow was first detected by the Nordic Optical Telescope in La Palma, Spain and later recorded by amateur astronomers in Buffalo, NY. [full story] Theorists believe that studying gamma-ray bursts at optical wavelengths might help unravel one of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy: what causes these powerful gamma-ray explosions? Since astronomers detected the first optical counterpart of a gamma-ray burst in 1997, they have vigorously pursued the afterglows using some of the most powerful telescopes including Hubble, Keck, and Palomar. Powerful telescopes are important for monitoring afterglows because they fade quickly, usually dimming to 19th magnitude or fainter just a few hours after the onset of the explosion. Advances in CCD technology are now bringing these faint fireballs within reach of dedicated amateur observatories. The afterglow recorded by amateurs in March, for instance, was 20th magnitude. Astronomy club observatories still can't record the spectra required to measure redshift-based distances to afterglows and they probably never will. The objects are simply too faint for spectroscopy. Redshifts will remain the province of Hubble and Keck for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, amateurs maintain one important advantage over their professional counterparts -- telescope time. Telescopes like Hubble and Keck are heavily oversubscribed. These behemoths simply can't turn to look at every single gamma-ray burst that comes along (GRBs are detected once or twice a day by Earth-orbiting satellites). With little competition for telescope time, amateur observatories are much more flexible. Eventually a global network of amateurs might monitor GRB afterglows nearly around the clock, a feat no single professional observatory can match. In fact, amateur observations of gamma-ray bursts seem so promising that the organizers have scheduled a special session of the workshop on Rapid Observations of GRBs by Amateurs. "The most important thing we're doing in this workshop is bringing interested members of the public into the scientific enterprise and making them a valuable part of it," concluded Joy. "These people are going to be the true ambassadors of high-energy astrophysics." Stay tuned to Science@NASA for more news from the High Energy Workshop for Amateur Astronomers, held April 12 - 14 near the NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. The MSFC-AAVSO High Energy Astronomy Workshop will be held in conjunction with the 89th Meeting of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). This meeting will be held the day after the Workshop, at the same venue (The Huntsville Marriott).

Yes, I remember watching much of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" on the BBC. It was mesmeric viewing. (The "according to Hoyle" Hoyle was actually a whist expert, who lived before contract bridge was invented.) :-)

This is true about Hoyle, but they published bridge how-to books in the US under his name - and probably still do. It is about as far in the game as I ever got...and that was another life long ago in academia. Btw, Mark, your book and brochures were repackaged by an Hawaiian lady postal worker yesterday for the newly created Global Priority. Expect something at work in the beginning of next week...!

(pssst....marcia....mine get off yet? *smile*)

YUP...went out with Mark's...but it was wrapped ok. Let me know when it arrived and in what condition. I am accumulating a new one for you *grin*

already? (mine isn't in yet, but i will let you know) and check this link http://www.msnbc.com/news/394725.asp?bt=pu&btu=http://www.msnbc.com/m/olk2k/msnbc_o_install.asp&cp1=1

I have been posting the Space News on the News Conference hoping more people would see it and read it. I would like to have it linked here...but cannot do it without telnetting and I am not yet able to do that.... http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/restricted/read/news/36/new I know I posted that article from the Keck telescope (which I can see from the living room window - on a clear day, that is...! Thanks for the link, Wolfie.

sure thing!!

The Home web site of the W. M. Keck Observatory is http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu:3636/ It looks rather plain but inside there are wondrous thing. Check it out!

Oh, yes, the specs on that nice Observatory on Mauna Kea (otherwise known as the Backyard...) The Observatory Observatory location Mauna Kea, Hawaii USA Headquarters location Kamuela, Hawaii USA Sponsoring Institutions California Institute of Technology, NASA & University of California Project management California Association for Research in Astronomy Donor W.M. Keck Foundation The Telescope Primary mirror design Segment Number of segments 36 Segment shape Hexagonal Segment diameter 1.8 meters (6 feet) Segment weight 880 pounds Segment material Zerodur (low-expansion glass-ceramic) Primary mirror diameter 10 meters (33 feet) Light-collecting area 76 square meters (818 square feet) Mirror curvature f/1.75 hyperbolic mirror Focal length 17.5 meters (57.4 feet) Total weight of glass 14.4 metric tons (15.9 tons) Telescope mount Altitude-Azimuth Overall telescope height 24.6 meters (80.7 feet) Total moving weight with mirrors, 270 metric tons (298 tons) The Dome Dome height 30.8 meters (101 feet) Dome width 37 meters (121.4 feet) Total moving weight 635 metric tons (700 tons) The Mountain Name Mauna Kea Location 20.708 N, 156.25 W English Meaning White Mountain Summit Elevation 4205 meters (13,796 feet) Keck Elevation 4146 meters (13,603 feet) Area 2,380 km2 (920 mi2, 22.8% of Hawaii Island) Volume ~30,000 km3 (~7,200 mi3)

Hey, hey, hey, Mark. Sir Frederick Hoyle, Astronomer extraordinaire, Plumian Professer at Cambridge, writer of many books on Astronomy - not Hoyle's on cards etc. Sir Fred Hoyle - is one of the most famous of british Astronomers - it was him who first interested me in astonomy. He first thought the universe was steady - i.e. steady state universe - but realised he was wrong. He has also written many science fiction books and has had two plays on BBC 1 - sorry to be so long replying but am inundated with reli's from U.K.

I still think the steady state makes more sense than the "Big Bang"... He is my hero because he is the most famous astronomer I have had the privilege of meeting in person...In Hawaii, no less!

Just thought you'd be interested... While the night sky may appear to be full of stars, there are really only about 3,000 stars visible to the naked eye. They can be seen without a telescope as they are either close to the Earth or extremely luminous. The closest star to Earth, not counting the sun, is Alpha Centauri. It is about 25 trillion miles, or 4.3 light years, away.

and we must remember that a lot of the star light we see are just getting to us after first lighting up millions of years ago. isn't that amazing?

Hey Marcia you have met my hero Fred Hoyle, you lucky lucky girl, he is one man I have always wanted to meet (apart from one other than is who shall be nameless!! Marcia knows) - but afraid I would be totally tongue tied with his great intelligence and way with words. I am almost inclined to agree with you Marcia re steady state cause I am not sure the universe is expanding as they say. I am not sure re the doppler affect also. The galaxies seem to move at such extreme speeds that it is beyond understanding. One thing I have wondered about when they look back and see quasars at some 16 billion light years away - are we seeing our past or what? Answers please. Or at least some thoughts.

*grin* Anne, he is shorter than I am...but droll and dapper - very appropriate-looking for a British Astronomer, I thought. I have spent my entire life with academics. They are no different from anyone else. I find it easy to speak with anyone because they are individuals, and I approach them that way. What we see beyond the considered 15 billion year age for the solar system is seeing the universe BEFORE we were coalesced into a galaxy. We were loosely joined star-stuff. If we could see a planet of the same age as we are ourselves at any distance in the realm of light years we would be seeing them as we were. More easy to understand is if we were to go there, we would see us in a far distant past. NASA Science News for April 21, 2000 Amateur astronomers attended a unique meeting in mid-April to learn about high-energy astrophysics and how they can participate in it. FULL STORY at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast21apr_1m.htm

EXPLODING STAR FEATURED ON WEB SITE Wednesday, April 26, 2000 16:04 A spectacular view of an exploding star was released today on a new web site launched to mark the Hubble Space Telescope's 10th year in orbit. The multi-coloured fireball, some 6,500 light years from Earth in the constellation Aquila, looks like a giant eye in space. A few thousand years ago a dying star about the same size as the Sun erupted and threw off its outer layers to create the "planetary nebula" NGC 6751. Shells of gas were hurled into space at speeds of 25 miles per second, glowing with the strong ultra-violet radiation emitted by the star's hot exposed core. The celestial cataclysm offers a sobering vision of what is in store for us. Our own Sun is predicted to undergo the same death throes in about six billion years' time. When it happens nothing in the Solar System, including the Earth, will escape destruction. The image is one of a number of dramatic pictures now available on the new Internet site http://hubble.stsci.edu Others include infant galaxies that existed billions of years ago, and tall, gaseous pillars that serve as incubators for embryonic stars. NGC 6751 shows several poorly understood features. Blue regions mark the hottest glowing gas, forming a ring around the central stellar remnant. Orange and red colours mark the locations of cooler gas, which tends to lie in long streamers pointing away from the central star, and in a tattered ring around the edge of the nebula. The origin of the cooler clouds within the nebula is still uncertain, but the streamers are evidence that they are affected by radiation and raging winds from the hot star at the centre. The star's surface temperature is estimated to be a scorching 140,000C. Hubble will be decommissioned in 2010 and replaced by the even more powerful Next Generation Space Telescope. � Press Association Thanks for this, Maggie

Universal Pictures Not content with mapping the world with its Terraserver project (http://www.terraserver.com) Microsoft is expanding its sights to include the entire universe. The company is setting up a database of digitised images of the sky, using pictures taken from the automated Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is currently collecting 200m shots of the cosmos. Microsoft which hopes the project will show how reliable the database products are, has a prototype of the website Try http://www.sdss.org which will eventually let users click on any part of the night sky to zoom in and see more detail. It looks a great site now and has lots in it.

Thanks!!! (having trouble with html programming?!)

yeah, I'll send you what i did (yesterday was not a good time to send it for checking!), so i did it the old way again.

Isn't there a planetary conjunction due early this month?

Planet earth gets a whole lot lighter IT HAS taken more than 300 years but science�s weightiest problem may at last have been solved. A group of American physicists has finally found an accurate way of weighing the Earth Tomorrow they will formally announce to the American Phys-ical Society that the Earth weighs 5,972 billion billion tonnes � about 10 billion bil-lion tonnes less than the best previous estimates. It is both a scientific landmark and the cul-mination of an international race, which Britain has lost. A rival group at Birmingham Uni-versity was within days of com-ing up with its own figure. The work was carried out by Professor Jens Gundlach, of the University of Washington, Seat-tle. �We are confident that we now know the mass of our home planet more precisely than it has ever been known to mankind,� he said. Scientists have fought over the planet�s weight since the 17th century; when Sir Isaac Newton first described how the Sun and the planets orbiting around it were held together by gravity � a force related to their masses. Newton worked out the basic rules of gravity, but lacked the equipment to measure the so-called gravitational constant. Without this he could only guess at the figures that have intrigued physicists ever since: the exact weight of Earth, the other planets and the sun. Since then scores of physi-cists have come up with values for Big G, as the constant has become known. Henry Cavend-ish came close in 1798 but his result, like all others since, was very inaccurate. All bodies exert a gravita-tional pull on other bodies around them. Its size depends on bow much they weigh and the distance between them. For anything less-massive than a star or planet the force is tiny. Most laboratory experiments have therefore been based on making highly accurate meas-urements of the attraction between two masses � usually lumps of metal. The tiny forces generated tend, however, to be swamped by others such as Earth�s own gravity, air move-ments and temperature changes. Even lorries parking near a labo-ratory can alter the results. Gundlach spent �160,000 constructing an apparatus mounted on turntables which were rotated to cancel out local anomalies. In his final set-up a small plate was suspended by a tungsten thread in a slowly rotat-ing cylinder. Then, a set of mas-sive weights mounted outside the cylinder was spun in the opposite direction � creating a gravitational pull on the plate. This put a tiny, measurable twisting force on the thread. -�The total force acting on the plate was equivalent to the weight of a bacterium,� said Gundlach. �It was amazingly hard t measure.� He believes the effects of his work will be profound. Apart from shaving billions of tonnes off previous estimates of Earth�s mass, it should give geologists a better idea of the density of the planet � ena-bling them to work out what is happening in the molten layers beneath the surface. Astrophysi-cists may also be able to get a better idea of the age of the uni-verse and bow long it will last. Perhaps the greatest benefit could be for cosmologists searching for the so-called grand unified theory, which sci-entists hope will one day explain the forces that first cre-ated the universe and which have since governed the behav-iour of everything � from stars to sub-atomic particles. Other scientists, however, are not optimistic. Clive Speake, of Birmingham University�s exper-imental gravitational physics group, is working on data from a separate experiment from which results for Big G and the Earth�s weight are also expected this week. He described Gundlach�s results as �pretty incredible� and added: �I nearly fell off my chair when I read his report. Nobody else has ever pretended to find these values with such a high level of accuracy. The test will be whether he and others can repeat this.� Gundlach, however, has also worked out the weight of the sun. But at 1.988 billion billion billion tonnes, even he accepts there is room for error. �We could be wrong by billions of tonnes� but it is still the clos-est we have got,� he said. Jonathan Leake Science Editor, The Sunday Times, April 30th 2000

Yes, May 5, 2000 is the grand alignment and it will not be visible because they are lined-up on the other side of the sun from us and will be lost in the glare. Posted Earlier in Space Sceince News re the Grand Alignment: May 5, 2000. Is doom at hand, as many mystics assert? Find out by reading the FULL STORY at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast30mar_1m.htm Planets for Dessert Also, for kids and kids-at-heart, a younger person's version of this article is available at the NASA Kids web site: http://kids.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2000/news-planetalign.asp?se

I was on my way to Geo27 but had to stop here for a bit... Very interesting stuff - another hobby interest is in radio astronomy/SETI. Once I get the dish mounted, I can start work on a hydrogen line receiver (1.4ghz) then I can listen to all the light dimmers in the neighborhood. I have seen plans for simple RA setups in the 400mhz and 12ghz range but I want to focus on L band stuff but there is some interesting signals heard around 5ghz as well - not sure if my 8ft dish will be any good but I have to start somewhere (plus need to find a 30ft dish...) - data crunching will be on the old P90. Any other radio astronomers out there? Mike

Spent 4 years in shouting distance of Green Bank, W Va and have seen Jodrell Bank as well. I'd love to be a mouse in the corner while you work with your array. Great stuff. SETI has a great website. Now, we are expecting photos of you at the controls. Must have a handy analyzer (used to be an oscilliscope sp?!) Please let us know what is happening as you create your listening post! I, for one, am very interested!

http://www.msnbc.com/news/399686.asp Please check this out! April 26 � A telescope that took a 10-day balloon ride over Antarctica has provided the most detailed glimpse ever into the fossil universe, as well as the best evidence yet that the cosmos conforms to classic geometry. The Boomerang experiment also confirms that all the matter we can see � from germs to galaxy clusters � accounts for only a small fraction of the universe. More at the above url. Thanks, Ginny!

(Patrick Moore (the 'Sky at Night' guy) is doing a live evening locally next month on'the Universe'. I am trying to persuade the house male to take me.)

Oh yes! Promise him anything! I would in similar circumstances. (How do you think we got to see Sir Fred Hoyle?!)

Patrick Moore is very, very special one of my favourite men - he is totally eccentric - totally given over to astronomy, talks the fastest I have ever heard in a quarter of an hour on the "Sky at Night" he got in half an hours worth of facts every month. He is I believe probably the greatest amateur astronomer ever. If you can get him on here I would be delighted - he would respond you know, I used to write to him in the U.K. and he always was delighted to respond, Fred Hoyle apart he is my favourite. Do try to contact him someone in the U.K. We had a delightful chappie on our channel nine programme this morning (Australia) that is talking about the planet alighment using a chocolate cake as an example! Pointing out that this alighment was not as near as many others but on the other hand it wouldn't be until 2690 before another like it! I was somewhat puzzled as I thought it was every 75 years or so.

Please excuse spelling. But I would be most interested in any response to my question.

I've no idea at the moment how to contact him Anne, but it would be great if we could get him interested. Have you heard him play the xylophone? He is truly extraordinary! I took down notes from last months sky at night, but haven't got round to posting them yet (can't find the pad I wrote on!). He also used to play the 'ask me any question about any computer game' quiz master on a kids programme on TV. I will definitely book to go and hear him, with or without the house male!

For years I subscribed to the Illustrated London News and adored it and most especially Partick Moore's regular contributions. I'm lining up behind you in the ranks of those who admire this most interesting man. ( I would suggest contacting him through where ever he is now publishing articles.)

A Hubble Decade To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 10th anniversary, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., has created a new Web site devoted to the Earth-orbiting telescope and its spectacular images. Offering much more than pretty pictures, the site recounts Hubble's discoveries, illustrates how the telescope works, and suggests various educational activities and games. Until June 6, you can also vote on which celestial object astronomers should point the Hubble telescope to. Go to: http://hubble.stsci.edu/ and http://heritage.stsci.edu/

Lost and Found: Hubble Finds Much of the Universe's Missing Hydrogen For the past decade astronomers have looked for vast quantities of hydrogen that were cooked up in the Big Bang but somehow managed to disappear in the empty blackness of space. Now, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered this long-sought missing hydrogen. This gas accounts for nearly half of the "normal" matter in the universe -- the rest is locked up in galaxies. The confirmation of this missing hydrogen will shed new light on the large-scale structure of the universe. The detection also confirms fundamental models of how so much hydrogen was manufactured in the first few minutes of the universe's birth in the Big Bang.

I also admire Carl Sagan and Patrick Moore, and have some of their books. Moore's "A-Z of Astronomy" is a great reference for quick (and easy to understand) explanations of astronomical terms. BTW, nice new marble background, Marcia!

Thank you for joining the Moore-Sagan fan club and for your approval of the new marble. Moore's column is the one thing I miss the most about no longer subacribing to the Illustrated London News. It was a slendid magazine until they sold it and "modernized" it. Read: They added many more adverts and removed lots of the serious content - especially the archaeology!

Ginny posted this in Science conference - and it was important enough that I am pasting it to here... Friday, May 5 Missing Matter Found At Last Astronomers announced on Wednesday that they have at long last found an elusive component of the universe's missing mass. The "dark matter" is in the form of giant clouds of hydrogen in intergalactic space. Such streams of gas were presumed to exist, as computer models showed matter collecting into ribbons as the universe cooled after the Big Bang. (Galaxies formed where the gas was densest.) Evidence for the hydrogen was revealed in spectra of a quasar taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. As light from a quasar travels toward Earth, some of the light is absorbed by atoms in the clouds. The redshifts of gases at different distances create spectral features at different, specific wavelengths. Todd Tripp and Edward Jenkins (Princeton University) and Blair Savage (University of Wisconsin-Madison) determined that the quasar's light had several absorption features due to ionized oxygen, which, the astronomers note, is a "tracer" for the hydrogen (itself invisible). Tripp and his colleagues explain that these hydrogen ribbons can account for as much as half of the universe's "normal" matter (that which is composed of protons and neutrons, as atomic nuclei are). The results appear in the May 1st Astrophysical Journal Letters. See the online press release: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2000/18/

It was never really missing. It was there all along; we just didn't know where or how to look for it.

Of course...*grin*

Please check http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/restricted/read/Geo/34.66

Atlantis Shuttle Poised for Friday Launch CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The space shuttle Atlantis was poised on its launch pad on Thursday, ready to send astronauts on a long-delayed repair and supply mission to the International Space Station, which is running short of power and slowly losing orbit. NASA scheduled liftoff for 6:12 a.m. EDT on Friday following a month of delays caused by bad weather, a crowded schedule of unmanned launches and the astronaut commander's badly sprained ankle, which has now healed after an in-training injury. When commander James Halsell docks Atlantis to the space station early on Sunday, the crew of six Americans and one Russian will be arriving at an outpost whose completion is more than two years behind schedule and months away from seeing its first long-duration crew. The unfinished $60 billion project will need repairs before construction can even resume. In April, bad weather caused the U.S. space agency to scrap the Atlantis launch on three consecutive days. Air Force forecasters were predicting perfect weather for Friday's launch. The first priority on the 10-day Atlantis mission is to restore full power to one of the two station modules now in orbit. Astronauts will replace four of six solar charged batteries that no longer fully recharge. The crew will also use thrusters on Atlantis to boost the station's orbit about 17 miles to a standard orbit of some 235 miles. Although the Earth's atmosphere is extremely thin at such distances, it has been enough to reduce the station's orbit by about 1.5 miles a week. With the boost, the station can be properly positioned for an automatic docking with its next major component, a Russian service module with living quarters and enough fuel to keep the station up on its own. The Russians plan to launch the module, dubbed Zvezda, in mid-July. Space-walking astronauts will also try to lock-down a wobbly construction crane outside the station. The mission was announced in February as Zvezda's launch was repeatedly delayed by trouble in the cash-strapped Russian space program. By then it had become clear the station would need stop gap repairs. ``We didn't think it would be this long before we got more modules up there,'' said the station's operations manager, Bob Cabana, who as an astronaut commanded the first assembly mission in 1998. NASA took four astronauts already in training for a supply mission Halsell, pilot Scott Horowitz, and mission specialists Mary Ellen Weber and Jeffery Williams and teamed them with a Russian cosmonaut and two American astronauts Yuri Usachev, Susan Helms and James Voss training in Moscow to become the second crew to live aboard the station. And even though the fledgling station is six months away from seeing its first live-aboard crew, and 12 months from hosting any serious science, NASA has called this mission a jump-start for the program. ``By this time next year, we'll have a real space station up there with a laboratory and an airlock and electrical power and a crew on-board,'' Cabana told reporters on Thursday. ``I think people ought to stop doubting and start believing, because we're launching.''

NASA Science News for May 26, 2000 The pioneering space station concepts of the mid-1950's don't look much like the erector-set habitat in orbit today. Read about Werner von Braun's early designs for an outpost in space and how he advocated his ideas to the public 50 years ago. FULL STORY at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast26may_1m.htm?l=NzMwMjk2IG1hcmNpQEFMT0hBLk5FVCBTTkdMSVNUIC66FwsfrRgz

Sunday Times 4/6/2000 Britons open eye on dawn of universe Jonathan Leake, Science Editor BRITISH astronomers are designing the world's ultimate telescope - so large it will be able to make direct observations of life-bearing planets in other solar systems. The so-called Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (Owl) will also see across space to the edge of the universe - collecting light emitted 11 billion years ago from the first stars formed. The insights it provides, say astronomers, will be stupendous. Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, said the project was "the next big step" in probing the origins of the universe. "It will be looking at more distant and fainter objects than ever before - including some that formed close to the big bang," he said. A telescope capable of such feats has long seemed an astronomer's fantasy. The crucial part of any telescope is its reflector, essentially a mirror, which focuses light into cameras and other instruments. The largest telescope made has a reflector 10 metres in diameter, tiny compared with the 100 metres needed for the Owl device. Until now astronomers had not even considered such a project. A 100-metre glass mirror is beyond modern technology, would be too heavy to move and would be pointless because of the way light is distorted when it passes through the atmosphere. At Durham University, however, a team of physicists has designed a system that replaces traditional reflectors with hundreds of thin flexible mirrors with just a fraction of the weight. Such mirrors may even be made of fabrics sprayed with reflective coatings. These can be built onto a flexible frame whose shape is computer-adjusted thousands of times a minute to counteract the distorting effects of the atmosphere. The result has been to cut the cost of the project to about �800m - less than the total cost of the Millennium Dome. Roger Davies, professor of astronomy at Durham, said the system meant ground-based telescopes would be able to make observations as if they were floating in space. "We will be able to see other planets clearly enough to measure water on their surface and oxygen in their atmospheres. Such planets could be capable of bearing carbon-based life," he said. The obstacles, however, remain formidable. Even with its advanced optics it will have to be built in the highest, driest place that can be found. The most likely spot is Cerro Paranal, high in the Andes mountains in Chile. "The cost means Britain cannot go it alone on this - it will be an international project," said Professor Ian Halliday, chief executive of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the government's funding agency for such research, when he unveiled the scheme last week. He is negotiating to link Britain with the eight European countries, including Germany, France, Italy and Holland, who already run the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Among the most important questions the Owl telescope would resolve is the structure and origin of the universe. What puzzles astronomers is why stars and galaxies are not spread around at random but occur in clusters with huge empty voids in between. More recently it emerged that galaxies often string themselves together into long filaments or form into flat sheets. The limited power of modern telescopes means they cannot provide enough detail to explain such phenomena. By contrast, the Owl telescope's ability to collect radiation from stars as they looked billions of years ago will allow astronomers to examine what was going on to create such unexpected patterns today. Its huge dish will also enable it to peer through the intergalactic clouds of dust that hide the hearts of galaxies and watch new stars being born. But it is the search for life on other planets that provides the most powerful inspiration for building such telescopes. Designs are being drawn up at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh. But Britain's astronomers are not driven only by lofty ideals. In the past few years there has been an increasing sense of frustration as Britain's telescopes have been eclipsed by others. The Americans, for example, have now got the Keck telescope, whose 10-metre reflector is the biggest in the world. Britain's European partners also have some spectacular facilities, in particular the very large telescope comprising four linked 8-metre reflectors that is nearing completion in Chile. Britain has taken no part in this project or any others of note except for paying a quarter of the costs of the Gemini observatory comprising two 8-metre telescopes, one in Hawaii and the other in Chile. It means that, unless the UK can initiate a large telescope project or buy into an existing one, it will soon be marginalised. Halliday said: "Britain has a long and proud history in astronomy and the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope is the kind of project we must get involved in to maintain that record."

oops sorry

trying to correct

You did just fine - I am going to leave it - momentous as it is! Thanks for posting it.

Hi All There was something in the most recent Astronomy magazine about the adaptation of military technology to telescopes to eliminate 'twinkle' - this had to do with making adjustments to the reflector mirror as well. Anyway, cool stuff - hope it gets built. Mike

Scientists Find Evidence of Water on Mars By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers said they had found convincing evidence that water flows on the surface of Mars, a finding that makes it much more likely life could exist or has existed on the planet. Photographs from NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor show gullies that look like they could have been formed only by large amounts of water bursting out and causing landslides, scientists Michael Malin and Kenneth Edgett said on Thursday. ``We see features that look like gullies formed by flowing water and the deposits of soil and rocks transported by these flows,'' Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, said in a statement. ``The features appear to be so young that they might be forming today. We think we are seeing evidence of a ground water supply, similar to an aquifer.'' Channels carved by flash floods in the U.S. West look very similar to the Martian gullies, said Mike Carr, a planetary geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. ``These images are dead ringers for things we see when we fly over the West,'' Carr, who wrote a book about water on Mars, said in an interview. Malin and Edgett have been poring over some 65,000 images taken by a camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor in the past year. What they saw shocked them. Right where they would least expect to find water, in the coldest crannies of craters facing away from the Sun and toward the poles, they found gullies. The most logical explanation is that they were formed by water. ``I was dragged to this conclusion kicking and screaming,'' Edgett told a news conference. The findings are astonishing because scientists had believed that water on Mars could only exist in frozen form, beneath the soil or tied up in polar icecaps, and as extremely sparse clouds in the thin Martian atmosphere. ``The presence of liquid water on Mars has profound implications for the question of life not only in the past, but perhaps even today,'' Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science, told the news conference. ``If life ever did develop there, and if it survives to the present time, then these landforms would be great places to look,'' said Weiler. The evidence is also overwhelming that the landslides were recent. Craters quickly pockmark everything on the surface of Mars, but no craters can be found in the piles of rock and dirt below the slides. Some of the slides also pile up over sand dunes, which themselves are transient. And intriguing glints of light and dark suggest there has not been time for the ubiquitous Martian dust that coats everything on the planet with a red powder to settle in some of the gullies. The new conclusions will have to be confirmed. The paper does not say that water itself has been detected -- only structures that, if found on Earth, would have been formed by water seeping up from underground, then building up under pressure and bursting out in an explosion of mud. ``I bet when this data gets out in the science community, there will be all sorts of proposals about how you could do this without water,'' Carr said. Malin and Edgett say they plan to study more pictures in the hope of finding one of these landslides in action. ``I personally will feel better when he shows me a picture some day ... and a channel has moved, a boulder has moved,'' Weiler said. The findings are a huge boost to NASA, which lost two Mars missions in a row late last year. The space agency is planning missions to Mars in 2003 and 2005 which will include the use of a robot to sample the planet's surface. ``It is very pleasing to be up on the dais talking about something positive for a change,'' Weiler said. ``It feels a lot better than crashing a satellite,'' he added later. NASA has admitted it may have cut a few too many corners in recent Mars missions. ``We pushed a little too far on faster, better, cheaper,'' Weiler said. ``We need to take a step back.'' But, he pointed out, the Mars Global Surveyor was the result of the ``faster, better, cheaper'' approach. ``I think one of the most interesting and significant aspects of this discovery is what it could mean if human explorers ever go to Mars,'' said Malin. ``If water is available in substantial volumes in areas other than the poles, it would make it easier for human crews to access and use it -- for drinking, to create breathable air, and to extract oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel or to be stored for use in portable energy sources.''

Try: http://www.starport.com/mars/ for more Mars specific info

I posted this yesterday on Geo 34 but thank you for putting another version in full here! *hugs*

Science News Model Tracks Storms from the Sun R. Cowen Hell hath no fury like a solar storm. When the sun blows its top, it hurls billions of tons of electrically charged gas into space at speeds up to 2,000 kilometers per second. Now, a group of astronomers has developed a reliable method for predicting how long it will take these storms to hit Earth. There, they can disrupt satellites, hamper radio communications, and knock out power grids. Another team has gathered observations that confirm a model of how the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, manages to store up enough magnetic energy to induce these upheavals. Both teams reported their findings this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Stateline, Nev. The new calculations of solar storms' arrival times relied on observations by two spacecraft. SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) stares directly at the sun and measures the speed of massive clouds of electrified gas known as coronal mass ejections. Those clouds that head toward Earth are detected by another spacecraft, called Wind, about an hour before they arrive. Predicting the travel time for a coronal mass ejection is a tricky business. Once launched from the sun, these clouds must make their way through the solar wind, the vast stream of ions that continuously blows out from the sun. Like the current of a great river acting on a tossed twig, the solar wind tends to pull slowermoving material up to its own speed and hold back material that sets off at a higher speed. more...http://www.sciencenews.org/20000624/fob1.asp

The SOHO C2 coronagraph captured this image of a sungrazing comet 0.75 degrees from the Sun on April 29, 2000. The solid brick-colored disk in the middle is the coronagraph's occulting disk; the white circle shows the true size of the Sun. The comet was noticed by four different amateur astronomers who were monitoring images from SOHO's realtime data page. All four (M. Boschat, T. Lovejoy, M. Oates, R. Gorelli) are credited with the discovery. The same comet was visible a day earlier in wider-angle C3 images, but it was much fainter. This 4-frame animation of the comet illustrates why it is easier to find sungrazers when they are very close to the Sun. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast07jul_1.htm?list

Caption above for this image:

COMET LINEAR NASA Science News for July 05, 2000 Comet 1999 LINEAR S4, which can already be seen through binoculars, is expected to become a faint naked-eye object similar in appearance to the Andromeda Nebula as it glides by the Big Dipper this month. Maximum brightness is expected on July 23, 2000. FULL STORY at http://spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast05jul_1m.htm?list

TIME LAPSE IMAGE OF COMET LINEAR This time-lapse sequence of Comet LINEAR-S4 was taken on July 2, 2000, from Arizona and shows the comet's movement over only 19 minutes. Credit & Copyright: Wil Milan

Comet Linear information pages: http://www.cometlinear.com/ http://www.skypub.com/sights/comets/0007linearS4.html Enjoy, photograph and post your comments!!!

Last Night's Aurora Report: Location: Bakersfield, CA (N118.00 W035.00) UTC Date/Time of Observation: 2000/07/14 at 08:17 for 01 hours 00 minutes. Dimmest Stars Visible: 4th to 5th Mag. Estimated Intensity of Activity: Moderate Elevation angle of activity above horizon: 120 degrees Types of activity observed: (Discrete Arcs) (Rays) (Curtains) Light Pollution: Moderate Sky Conditions (cloudy or not): Clear View Estimated Lunar Interference: High (Near-Full Moon) Comments: I have never seen it here before... my mother lives 75 miles away and described almost exactly the same thing I saw!

okay. I seem to be the only one who saw the lunar eclipse last night. I live in Perth, Western Australia, as it was a somewhat showery evening, I had to dodge between the showers. Nevertheless it was an awesome sight. The moon looked first time as if it was smoke covered, red coloured and rather smaller than usual. Gradually the red colour took over although it still seemed to be on fire - rather strange. It was weird and rather peculiar, and I can imagine some 100/200 years ago would have caused panic. Portents and goodness knows what else. It was well worth seeing and lasted for some three hours. I apologise for not taking a picture but the weather was to unstable to chance staying outside too long.

Anne, a million thanks for that report. Scroll back and see my son's pix (I'l post the url for the exact place) so you can compare the last lunar eclipse.

For all of the most current Aurora reports please check http://www.spacew.com/www/auroras.html Looks like England had the best show!

I heard about the lunar eclipse on the news. They showed people in Japan viewing it.

Yeah.....I got to watch a downpour but some others saw it at 2am here so I am really unhappy for having missed it. Oh well. For my son's images ofd the previous lunar eclipse http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/public/read/geo/24.97 http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/public/read/geo/24.207

Chris report Last night's aurora from Eastern Pennsylvania as being green, pink and blue with stars sparkling through it. He prnounced it beautiful. It was his first experience seeing it. I am delighted - now if I can only get him to post his report next time.....sigh

Um.....that comment about posting ones own report was not just directed at Chris. We all like to read someone other than my words on any topic. Ok?!

Unveiling the Infrared Sky NASA Science News for July 20, 2000 Your home computer can become a portal to a wonderland of stars, thanks to a massive release of images from an infrared sky survey sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation. The current release is based on a volume of data several hundred times larger than that contained in the human genome! FULL STORY at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast20jul_1.htm?list

Coronal Mass Ejection 21 July 2000 There is high probability that the CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) from the major M-class solar flare of 19 July 2000 will arrive today. It is expected to hit the Earth almost head-on. It is not expected to be as intense as this last weekend's event. Auroral activity is expected to increase to storm levels on 21 July 2000. There is a good chance for observations of auroral activity from many dark-sky middle latitude regions, particularly prior to midnight when the moon is still below the horizon and optimal observing conditions exist. Moonrise occurs near local midnight. TWO ADDITIONAL M-Class flares occured today: :ALERTS: X-Ray event M5/1B/S12W14 BEG 20 Jul 2000 2022 MAX 20 Jul 2000 2025 END 20 Jul 2000 2028 UT Comment: None X-Ray event M5.5 BEG 21 Jul 2000 1430 MAX 21 Jul 2000 1437 END 21 Jul 2000 1443 UT Comment: None More: http://hfradio.org/propagation.html

Comet LINEAR update Space Weather News for July 22, 2000 Comet LINEAR will reach maximum brightness around July 23, 2000, as it glides past the bowl of the Big Dipper. Sky watchers have been hoping that LINEAR would become visible to the unaided eye. However, monitoring data from a global network of astronomers suggest that the comet's brightness will peak at a visual magnitude of +6.5, just below the threshold for naked-eye visibility. LINEAR should still be a visual treat when viewed through binoculars or a small telescope. ALSO: The Boulder sunspot number soared this week to a value of 401. Experts say that's rare, even near the peak of the solar maximum. For more information please visit http://www.spaceweather.com NOTE to readers: Since SpaceWeather.com was launched in its current form on January 1, 2000, the site has focused on solar and geomagnetic activity. Comets and meteors are an important aspect of space weather, too. With today's update about comet LINEAR we will begin an accelerating program of coverage for comets, meteor showers, and related astronomical events.

Comet LINEAR breaks apart Space Weather News for July 28, 2000 There is growing evidence that comet LINEAR, which made its closest approach to the Sun earlier this week, is disintegrating. Today's spaceweather.com features images and animations of the apparent breakup. Also, an interplanetary shock wave struck Earth's magnetosphere on July 28, 2000, triggering minor geomagnetic activity. For more information please visit http//www.spaceweather.com http//www.spaceweather.com

Wow a shock wave!

Amazing, huh?! They have great photos on that above url.

Propagation Forecast Bulletin 31 - August 4, 2000 Solar activity for last week (July 28 - August 3) was mostly at low levels. A minor M-class flare from region 9090 occurred on July 28. Several new regions (9110, 9111, 9112, 9113, 9114, and 9115) emerged later in the week. Region 9114 produced a C7 flare and associated CME on August 2. The 10.7 cm solar flux, following the sun's 27-day rotation period, decreased to a minimum of about 155 at the beginning of last week. Solar flux is forecasted to steadily climb to a maximum of about 240 around mid-August. A comment about 10.7 cm solar flux - although 10.7 cm solar flux is easy to measure because the Earth's atmosphere is transparent at that wavelength, energy at 10.7 cm is about 1 million times less energetic than the true ionizing energy. Thus 10.7 cm solar flux contributes nothing to the formation of the ionosphere. But it is an indicator of the general activity level of the sun, and smoothed solar flux values (a 12 month running average) correlate very well with smoothed sunspot numbers (SSN). Solar activity for next week (August 4 - August 10) is expected to be at moderate to high levels. Isolated M-class flares are expected, along with a chance for an isolated major flare. Historically the equinox months (September and March) give us the greatest amount of magnetic storms due to the orientation of the Earth at these times with respect to the solar wind. Thus expect an increase in storms up to mid-September, then a gradual decrease after that to a minimum in December. Cycle 23 continues its march upward, with a peak forecasted by the end of the year. For details, see the web site referenced in last week's bulletin (http://www.sec.noaa.gov/weekly/index.html). The latest SSN data is 113 for January 2000. The estimated SSN for the month of August is 120. Cycle 23 appears to be similar to, but just a bit higher than, Cycle 20, which peaked at an SSN of 110. This level of activity, while not approaching that of Cycles 22 and 21, will still give us excellent conditions on the higher HF bands as we progress from Summer to Fall and into Winter. Sunspot numbers for July 27 through August 2 were 174, 163, 183, 138, 123, 139 and 153 with a mean of 153.3. 10.7 cm flux was 162.4, 157.8, 153.2, 149.9, 147.9, 149.4 and 150.6, with a mean of 153, and estimated planetary A indices were 9, 30, 27, 10, 19, 15 and 14, with a mean of 17.7.

Astronomers Discover Nine Planets Outside Earth's Solar System Manchester, England, Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Astronomers say they've discovered nine planets, many as large as Jupiter, that orbit stars close to Earth, providing evidence that other solar systems made up of multiple planets exist. The results, presented at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Manchester, England, increase the number of planets discovered outside Earth's solar system to 50, said astronomer Dr. Jacqueline Mitton. ``We're making a leap to much more-distant stars,'' she said. Many of the planets discovered are 10 light-years to more than 100 light-years from Earth. The sun, by comparison, is eight light-minutes away, she said. A light year, the distance that light travels in one year, is equal to about 5.88 trillion miles. ``They're typically like Jupiter or Saturn, but it's not possible to determine exactly,'' Mitton said. ``They are giants, giant planets. They're balls of gas or liquid.'' Jupiter is about 300 times the size of Earth, U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman Don Savage said. NASA helped fund the research, along with the U.S. National Science Foundation and Sun Microsystems Inc. All research was done using land-based telescopes, he said. The planets are discovered by measuring the gravitational pull, or ``wobble'' on stars the planets exert as they revolve around them, the same way the Earth follows an orbit around the sun. The results require a long series of exacting measurements that take ``several years'' to complete, Mitton said. While previous discoveries have been of single planets, ``there is evidence of multiple planets within these systems,'' Mitton said. Evidence also suggests the existence of smaller planets similar to Earth, not composed of fiery gases, that could in theory sustain life, she said. BBG/Astronomers-Discover-Nine-Planets-Outside-Ea/ Any redistribution of Bloomberg content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Bloomberg L.P. Any reference to the material must be properly attributed to Bloomberg News.

Perseid Dawn NASA Science News for August 08, 2000 The Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12, 2000. This year the bright, nearly-full Moon will outshine the Perseids most of the night, but for an hour between moonset and sunrise on Saturday morning, star gazers could witness a brief but beautiful meteor shower. The setting Moon may put on a show of its own Saturday. Wildfires and dust storms have filled parts of our atmosphere with aerosols. A low-hanging Moon seen through such dusty air can take on a beautiful pink or orange hue. FULL STORY at http://spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast08aug_1.htm?list

Perseid meteor update + an ongoing geomagnetic storm Space Weather News for August 11, 2000 http://www.spaceweather.com On the eve of the Perseid meteor shower, sky watchers report seeing 10 to 15 meteors per hour streaming from the constellation Perseus. That's consistent with an expected peak rate between 30 and 50 visual meteors per hour before dawn on August 12th. The projected maximum is somewhat weaker than Perseid maxima of recent years, but observers are also reporting that this year's Perseid meteors have been pleasantly bright. The shower should put on a good show for northern hemisphere observers this Saturday morning. Readers are invited to send their photos of the 2000 Perseids to phillips@spacescience.com (Tony Phillips). There is a chance that Saturday morning sky watchers at higher latitudes could spot colorful auroras during the Perseid meteor shower. Our planet is experiencing an ongoing geomagnetic storm triggered by a southward-pointing interplanetary magnetic field in the vicinity of Earth. If conditions persist, high latitude (and possibly even mid-latitude) auroras are possible. For more information, please visit http://www.spaceweather.com

Thank Maggie for forwarding this! Manned flight to Mars in 2014? By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse (11 August 200) The best time for the first manned mission to Mars will be in 2014, says James Longuski of Purdue University in the US. This is because the position of the planets will provide an escape route back to Earth in the event of an accident. Because of an alignment of Earth, Mars and Venus, a so-called gravitational slingshot manoeuvre would take astronauts to Mars and, if needed, bring them home safely. According to Professor Longuski, the emergency flight path would only be possible if the spacecraft was launched within a few days of 14 January 2014. Via Venus Orbital calculations show that no similar escape option exists for at least a decade before or after 2014. This means that astronauts might be forced to attempt a landing on Mars even if their spacecraft became crippled in an accident on the way to Mars. "This trajectory is remarkably fortuitous as it does not exist for many years prior to or after the 2014 date," Professor Longuski said. Nasa has also identified 2014 as a possible launch date for the first human mission to Mars in a 1997 study. Professor Longuski discovered that the safest route to take would be one that permitted a quick return trip, via Venus, in case of an accident that forced the Mars landing to be aborted. If that happened, the Martian gravity would change the spacecraft's trajectory, hurling it toward Venus, where another gravity assist would return the spacecraft back to Earth. The gravity assist would allow a safe return to Earth even if the spacecraft's main rocket engine failed, Professor Longuski said. Currently, Nasa has small-scale studies but no plans for a manned mission to Mars. Many experts say that it is too late to organise a mission in 2014. But the advantages of that date may force Nasa to look again at manned flights to Mars

also from Maggie and Reuters: New evidence suggests ocean on icy Jupiter moon WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New information provides the strongest evidence yet that lying beneath the icy surface of one of Jupiter's moons may be a salty ocean of water, one of the necessary ingredients for life, researchers reported on Friday. Scientists said data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft suggest the presence of water in liquid form on Europa, a moon similar in size to the Earth's. The Galileo spacecraft passed close to Europa in January. Measurements from magnetic fields led scientists to conclude that "water is the most probable medium on Europa," wrote Margaret Kivelson of the University of California at Los Angeles. Kivelson and her colleagues reported their findings in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Previous NASA orbiters had beamed images of huge cracks in Europa's surface that indicated a liquid ocean might be sloshing underneath. But scientists could not tell from those pictures whether the water was frozen or still in liquid form, a key element for supporting life. Galileo collected data from magnetic fields and scientists found patterns that indicated the possibility of water, Kivelson and her colleagues wrote. While they did not rule out other scenarios, the scientists said water was the most likely explanation for the patterns they saw. Given the findings, Europa ranks just behind Mars as bodies in the solar system that merit further exploration for life forms, said David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology. "After Mars, it remains the most attractive extraterrestrial environment within our solar system in which to seek evidence of past or present life," Stevenson wrote in an accompanying article in Science. Stevenson said the Galileo evidence of water is "overwhelming.... A global layer of water with a composition similar to Earth seawater and a thickness greater than about 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) could explain the data." Future flights to Europa could provide more answers. NASA says it hopes to send another spacecraft there, although the space agency's missions have been hindered by budget constraints.

More on black holes..... Tuesday September 12 1:36 PM ET NASA Shows Evidence of 'Missing Link' Black Holes http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20000912/sc/space_holes_dc_1.html By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Black holes, those matter-sucking drains in space, used to come in only two sizes: small and extra, extra large. Tuesday, NASA offered evidence of a mid-size ``missing link'' black hole. Astronomers have theorized for years that such ``missing links'' existed in the rarefied world of black holes, but now they may have detected an example of this type using NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. A black hole with the mass of 500 suns packed into a region the size of Earth's moon has been detected in the M82 galaxy some 12 million to 15 million light years away, Wallace Tucker of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said by telephone. Unlike black holes with a mass of up to a billion stars that tend to lie at a galaxy's center, the ``missing link'' is located some 600 light years from the heart of M82. That is relatively close in galactic terms. A light year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year. Relatively tiny black holes, known as stellar black holes because many have the mass of just a single star, are scattered throughout galaxies, including the Milky Way, which contains Earth. Black holes are the gluttons of the cosmos, gobbling up everything that comes near, not even letting light escape. For that reason they are invisible to scientists but can be detected by activity around their edges. Scientists had suspected that M82 might contain a so-called mid-mass black hole, but these suspicions were not confirmed until high-resolution images made with Chandra found that most X-rays in the galaxy were coming from a single, bright source. Repeated observations of M82 also showed that the X-ray flickered, brightening and dimming every 10 minutes or so. This flicker is the tell-tale sign of a black hole slurping gas from a nearby star or cloud, NASA scientists said. ``This is an interesting scientific mystery that's been solved by superior resolution of the Chandra observatory,'' Tucker said. He said scientists reported years ago that such an X-ray source might exist in M82 and there were also hints of such sources in other galaxies. But the telescopes could only ``see'' the center of the galaxy as ``one big blob,'' lacking the power to determine just where the X-rays were coming from. The M82 ``missing link'' is not in the absolute center of the galaxy, but comparatively close to it. It does seem to e in an area of rapid star formation and this raises questions about how the mid-size black hole formed, Tucker said. ``Did black holes that formed from normal stars form and then merge to form a 500 solar mass black hole or did massive stars collide and merge to form a hyperstar, that then collapsed to form (the ``missing link'') in one fell swoop?'' he said. Stellar black holes form as a natural consequence of evolution of massive stars that run out of the fuel they need to support their inner portions, which collapse of their own weight to form a black hole.

Just don't fall in, my dear!

16 September, 2000 Two full-halo coronal mass ejections (CMEs) occurred on September 15, 2000, and a third CME on September 16, 2000 has been observed as the brightest of the three. These were associated with solar flares (M5-class for the latest of the three CMEs). Due to the complex delta magnetic field in the Sunspot group 9165, there is a good chance for further eruptions. Those who wish to experience Aurora (visual as well as the radio propagation mode) should be on the lookout from this point forward. At the time of writing, the Aurora index is 10, the highest level. :ALERTS: Magnetic K-Index of 4 Warning valid from 16 September, 2000 1800Z to 17 September, 2000 1500Z. Magnetic A-Index greater than=30 Watch for 19 September, 2000Z. Magnetic A-Index greater than=30 Watch for 20 September, 2000Z. Report by NW7US More: http://hfradio.org/propagation.html

Mauna Kea may get extremely large scope Mauna Kea may be considered for a telescope with 10 times the light-collecting area of the world's largest optical telescopes, already atop the Big Island mountain. University of California and California Institute of Technology researchers who developed the 10-meter Keck telescopes have proposed building a 30-meter California Extremely Large Telescope (CELT). Almost routine discoveries have been coming out of the twin Kecks. CELT's mirror would allow astronomers to look deeper into the universe with more detail. "It means you can study fainter, more distant objects in the same vein of many observations at Keck, but you can do them better," said Jerry Nelson, University of California-Santa Cruz professor of astronomy and astrophysics who heads the telescope design working group. Mauna Kea and several sites in Chile have been mentioned for the CELT, which project leaders hope to build in 10 to 15 years. Joseph Miller, director of UC Observatories/Lick Observatory, estimated the cost at about $500 million. "We're working on the conceptual design but we don't have money in the bank so anything could happen two years from now," Nelson said in a telephone interview. "People could say, 'Whatever happened to CELT?' It's not a sure thing but we have strong support at the highest level of academic institutions." The master plan for Mauna Kea anticipated such a telescope, according to Robert McLaren, interim director of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. In the plan, it's called "Next Generation Large Telescope," describing the class of telescopes CELT falls into -- bigger than a 25-meter aperture, McLaren said. But while the plan foresees a telescope like CELT, such a project "would have to be fully reviewed, assessed and approved," he said. As a one-time Hawaii resident, Nelson said he'd like to see the new telescope go to Mauna Kea. "But for a project like this, you have to look for the best site for scientific and technical reasons, as well as fold in political things." A couple of sites in Mauna Kea's summit area might be suitable for a telescope as massive as the CELT, he said. "Nonetheless, one must be sensitive to the political issues in Hawaii about developing the summit of Mauna Kea," he said. If that site is chosen, Nelson said, project leaders would work with the community to address concerns and "not steamroll" over them. Since the Keck telescopes are owned and operated by UC and Caltech, which CELT would be as well, Nelson thinks "there would be a very strong connection. I could envision the same headquarters in Waimea." Because of the high maintenance costs of such facilities, however, the universities might end up selling or trading off part of Keck to support CELT, Nelson said. "It's all highly speculative as to what would happen in 10 years," he said. McLaren said there is a trend to give the national astronomy community more access to large telescopes, mostly in private hands, in return for more federal support. "In the case of Keck, it's unlikely that would happen real soon," he said, noting NASA is a partner in the telescope operation. Nelson said CELT leaders probably will start thinking seriously about sites in a year and aim for a decision in about four years. With CELT and adaptive optics, astronomers should be able to study galaxies and other distant things with better angular resolution than the Hubble Telescope, he said. "You really win bigger by a bigger telescope, with more light sensitivity and better resolution, sharper. We will learn more about what's happening at the distant edge of the universe." CELT also will be powerful in exploring star-forming regions and planet formation, Nelson said. "It has a lot of potential. Our (astronomy) communities are really excited about this. "Experience has shown when you're building new facilities like this, the most exciting stuff that comes out of it you haven't anticipated at all -- things you just didn't even know."

Sunday Times 17th Sept http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/ Britain plans �25m shield to prevent asteroid collisions Jonathan Leake, Science Editor A GOVERNMENT team is to propose spending up to �25m on a plan that would safeguard Britain and the world from devastation by a giant asteroid or comet. The Spaceguard initiative, expected to be announced tomorrow by Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the science minister, could see Britain using a chain of telescopes to detect and monitor "near-Earth objects". A report, from a commission appointed by Sainsbury, says that Earth faces a tiny but definite risk of being struck one day by an asteroid - a large lump of stone or metals travelling at tens of miles a second. This kind of impact is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago. A monitoring station, possibly based at Armagh in Northern Ireland and linked to telescopes around the world, would be the first stage in a programme that would also investigate ways of knocking any approaching asteroid off a collision course with Earth. One option could be to fire a nuclear missile that would explode close to the incoming rock and deflect it. At least two big impacts were recorded during the last century alone. The first, at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908, devastated an area the size of greater London. The other, in Brazil in 1947, left several huge craters. Both fell in unpopulated areas and nobody was killed. Last week astronomers announced that a huge asteroid would cross Earth's orbit today at a range of 2.6m miles. In astronomical terms this is a tiny distance - and others will come much closer. In 2027, a rock measuring half a mile in diameter, travelling at 50 miles per second and known as 1999 AN10, will hurtle past Earth at a distance of just 200,000 miles. It will pass close by several more times - with nobody yet able to predict whether it will hit the planet. The British commission includes Professor Harry Atkinson, who has worked for the European Space Agency and other international bodies, and Sir Crispin Tickell, the former British ambassador to the United Nations. It was set up in January. The threat is already taken seriously by America and Japan, which have established their own Spaceguard projects. Nasa has said it plans by 2006 to track all asteroids with diameters greater than 1km that will cross the path of Earth. An asteroid that size would wipe out most life and there would have been many such events early in Earth's 4.6 billion-year history. Now, however, the risk is much lower because most potential collisions have already happened. The last big asteroid, about six miles in diameter, was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The commission's report says Britain's role could be to find smaller objects, between 50 yards and about half a mile in diameter, of which there are many thousands. Up to six telescopes would have to be built - some designed to detect near-Earth objects, others to track them continually and a third group to analyse the light they reflect in order to find out what they are made of. The aim of Spaceguard would be to ensure that Earth had sufficient advance warning - hopefully decades - to investigate and then take preventive action. A Whitehall source said: "We accept there is a risk and want Britain to take a leading role in dealing with it." Sainsbury wants other European countries to help finance the network, which would be computerised and would enable astronomers to build up a huge database from which they could predict which objects presented a threat. Mark Bailey, director of the Armagh Observatory, a world-renowned centre for the study of asteroids and comets, where the project would probably be based, believes the world is now so heavily populated that even a small impact could kill millions. "Asteroid and comet impacts have changed human history in the past and it could happen again," he said. The biggest risk to Earth is from comets that appear at random from the Oort Cloud - a huge sphere of icy rubble that surrounds the solar system. They move very fast and could reach Earth within months of being spotted. Dr Bill Napier, an astronomer who specialises in comets and asteroids, believes the only solution is to set up a fleet of rockets carrying nuclear bombs that could be detonated half a mile from any threatening object. "You would only have to nudge them a few metres to send them safely past Earth to avoid Armageddon," he said.

House male says he could do it at half the price and would send everyone Bibles! The USA is also planning a defense system. Good grief, is their no end to our stupidity?!

Explain please why you consider it stupid?? I understand there is a large asteroid expected to arrive some 200,000 miles near earth in 2027. Some predictions of its closeness have been as little as 30,000 miles. An asteroid arrived some 2.6 million miles from earth last Sunday, which was considered close in Space terms. It would seem sensible to me to be looking at what could be done to deflect asteroids or comets and provide early warning ... the kinds of warning time I heard about was up to 10 years.

To read the full report of the Task force on Potentially Hazardous Near Earth Objects go to http://www.nearearthobjects.co.uk/downloads/full_report.pdf You will need Acrobat Reader The report is not dry and dusty ..it has a lot of information on comets and asteroids as well as plenty of pictures, and makes fascinating reading.

Ok, lighten the mood ...Here's something completely different ... The Dogon's Enigmatic Scientific Knowledge of Medicine and Astronomy http://www.discovertimbuktu.com/am/culture.html One of the top 10 places to see in Africa, the Dogon's homeland has been designated a World Heritage site for its cultural and natural significance. They are also famous for their artistic abilities and vast knowledge about astrology, especially the Sirius star, which is the center of their religious teachings. The Dogons know that Sirius A, the brightest system in our firmament, is next to a small white dwarf called Sirius B, which was not identified by western scientists until 1978. The Dogons knew about it at least 1000 years ago. Sirius B has formed the basis of the holiest Dogon beliefs since antiquity. Western astronomers did not discover the star until the middle of the nineteenth century, and it wasn't even photographed until 1970. The Dogons go as far as describing a third star in the Sirius system, called "Emme Ya" that, to date, has not been identified by astronomers. In addition to their knowledge of Sirius B, the Dogon mythology includes Saturn's rings and Jupiter's four major moons. They have four calendars, for the Sun, Moon, Sirius, and Venus, and have long known that planets orbit the sun.

Take a virtual tour of the sun ...this site is fantastic http://www.michielb.nl/sun/kaft.htm

Aurora Watch + An Unusual Asteroid Space Weather News for Oct. 3, 2000 http://www.spaceweather.com Ongoing geomagnetic activity could intensify on Wednesday or Thursday when an Earth-directed solar coronal mass ejection arrives in the neighborhood of our planet. With the Moon just past New, it may be a good time for stargazers to watch for dark-sky aurora. In other news, a Near-Earth Asteroid that passed our planet in September appears to be a binary space rock. See http://spaceweather.com for amateur video of the asteroid racing through the sky on October 2nd. For more information and images, please visit http://SpaceWeather.com

Storms Collide on Jupiter NASA Science News for October 24, 2000 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured dramatic images of two swirling storms on Jupiter as they collided to form a truly titanic tempest. FULL STORY at http://spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast24oct_1.htm?list89800

I o=posted this in radio being sassy to Mike, for which I apologize only a little: I've seen zodiacal light and Gegenshein and loads of green flashes and one turquoise flash along with abut 20 comets and innumerable satellites. Sonic booms but not from the Shuttle. Have seen the shuttle fly over and watched the first burnout ofEarth's orbit on the first moon trip. The last was just after having had dinner with astronauts on either side of me and across the table. Fascinating guys!!! Sunset rays are also frequent here. Oh, and the southern cross. The magellanic clouds are visible from here but just a little while per year. I should have added that I have also seen brilliant red and green aurorae just after a cloudy day had enabled us to see a huge sunspot with the naked eye. That must have been an enormous CME!!!

Oooh, also seen noctilucent clouds, and was reminded of the eclipses lunar which I have also seen. Alas, I missed the total solar eclipse HERE and the annular eclipse in California while I was there. Heavy clouds obsured even the darkening of the skies at totality in both cases. Do not come near me if you want to see things eclipse solar. The gods to not want me to see that. I did see the 3/4 eslipse many years ago in West Virginia and it was spectacular. Also another partial here for which I put up a pinhole porjector for public inspection in front of the college library. It worked splendidly. No UFOs, though... Ok guys, add you things to my list... What have you seen?

Here in Pittsburgh, which gets on average 49 clear days per year, everytime there's an eclipse or a meteor shower, it's either raining or cloudy. You can look up and see -- clouds.

check the picture with this caption - and the rest of the article! http://starbulletin.com/2000/11/13/news/story4.html UH Institute for Astronomy This is one of the most distant galaxy clusters discovered so far: almost 8 billion light years away. Early measurements suggest that this system may be one of the most massive clusters known. The picture was taken with the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter telescope. Galaxies in the cluster appear as fuzzy yellowish blobs, while galaxies in the foreground (closer to us) appear bluer and galaxies in the background (farther away from us) appear redder. Non diffuse, bright objects are foreground stars. This image spans about 6-7 million light years of space.

Are you sure, Cheryl, that you are not living just down the street from me? Sounds like Hilo weather!

I think there might be some connection. Some strange weather connection through a dimensional portal.

Anyone listen to the Leonids last night? Accessed the Marshall space center's live streaming video and put on full screen. Watched them fill the weather balloon, launch it with the camera and listening devices and watched it rise and rise and rise. On the second re run of the filling of the balloon, etc, I finally fell asleep, hours before our portion of earth rotated so that we were facing outer space and incoming projectiles. Did anyone see anything?

I've been asked by my dear friend and lady I love, MarciaH, to contribute a few postings to this wonderful conference site she maintains. I've had a life-long interests in astronomy, volcanology, and planetary geology, and although I'm no expert in any of those fields, I find them fascinating nonetheless. One of the things that most attracts me to astronomy is the simple beauty and awe-inspiring grandeur of many of the images of astronomical objects that have been produced over the years, especially by the Hubble Space Telescope, which continues to orbit the Earth on it's mission of exploration, discovery, and research. One of the most remarkable images taken by the Hubble is actually a composite mosiac of several images called the Hubble Deep-Field Image. These images were taken over a period of several days beginning on December 18, 1995 until December 30 of that year. The images were of a fairly "empty" (or so it was thought) region of sky just north of the bowl of the Big Dipper in the constellation of Ursa Major (R.A. 12Hrs 36' 49.4000", Dec. +62Deg. 12' 58.0000"). After a series of long-duration exposures totaling some 100 hours, the images Hubble returned revealed showed a few local stars which inhabit our galaxy (the stars are the bright objects with classic "starpoints", which are actually defraction spikes--relics of light being scattered, refracted, and reflections from the telescope's optical structure), but everything else to be found in the images are individual galaxies like our own--island continents of millions, billions, and even trillions of stars. Some 1,200 - 1,500 separate galaxies have been counted i the Hubble Deep Field Image, the vast majority of which had never been observed before. Most of these galaxies are amongst the most distant ever observed, 10 to 12 billion light years away, meaning we are glimpsing these objects at a very early point in the Universe's history, when galaxies were still fairly new kids on the cosmic block. But the most remarkable aspect of the Hubble Deep Field Image is this: these incredibly distant galaxies are so far away that the area of sky they occupy is so small, that it could easily be covered by a single grain of sand held at arms length... Here is a link to a glimpse of this astonishingly beautiful, yet remarkably humbling image: http://cadcwww.dao.nrc.ca/hst/hdf/PR/MosaicQ.jpg

Neil, love, thank you for a spectular post! You sent me to see that image and it was stunning. The size of the universe is brought home most impresiively in your comment that this world of galaxies is just a sand-grain in size?! Held at arm's length!!! I sit and stare at that picture and I am stunned at the vastness it represents in that one sand grain... *Hugs*

thanks for that, neil. based on the fact that some starlight are from stars that have expired years and years ago but their light is only now reaching the earth. is it possible that the galaxies being observed by the hubble have already died away?

Neil, thank you for the information on the Hubble Telescope. I is something that I've heard about for years, but didn't really have much understanding or information.

That's awesome, thinking man!

SKY & TELESCOPE'S NEWS BULLETIN - DECEMBER 8, 2000 =========================================================== For images and Web links for these items, visit http://www.skypub.com =========================================================== Axel Mellinger's composite image of the entire Milky Way was so stunning that we made it into a poster. Now, not only is there a 2nd Edition of his quick-selling panorama, Mellinger has imaged the polar regions as well to create a spectacular all-sky view. The 24-by-36- inch "Celestial Sphere" poster consists of 51 wide-angle exposures stitched together into a seamless "real" map of the entire sky. The poster comes with a key chart identifying major constellations and stars. To order either of Mellinger's posters, visit Sky Publishing's online store at http://store.skypub.com/ or call 800-253-0245. =========================================================== MARTIAN SEDIMENTS: ANCIENT LAKEBEDS OR BLOW-INS? Dramatic new images show that Mars once had an environment that created sediment-like layers within craters and canyons across much of the planet's midsection. In some locales hundreds of individual beds can be counted, occasionally creating stacks of alternating light and dark layers 2 to 4 kilometers tall. In the region known as Terra Meridiani, the sediments extend continuously for hundreds of kilometers. As detailed by Michael C. Malin and Kenneth S. Edgett in the December 8th issue of Science, the layers could be explained by two very different climatic scenarios. "The first, and perhaps favored, model draws heavily on comparison to Earth to invoke a planet and environment capable of sustaining liquid water on its surface," they state. Thus the sediments occur preferentially in confined areas where water would tend to collect. The other scenario, which Malin and Edgett consider "a plausible but uniquely Martian explanation," envisions times when the Martian atmosphere was denser, enough so to mobilize and deposit huge amounts of dust. For example, the red planet's polar tilt is known to oscillate between 15 and 35 deg. every 100,000 years, a cycle that probably induces drastic changes in atmospheric pressure and climate as the thick polar ice caps vaporize and become redistributed. At such times the planet might have experienced ferocious dust storms, or the atmosphere may have aided in the transport of volcanic ash or impact debris. "We think both models have some validity," Malin told SKY & TELESCOPE, "or we wouldn't have included both." Although surface ages are notoriously difficult to estimate on Mars, the two researchers believe most of the sediments date from the earliest span of Martian history, between 3.5 and 4.3 billion years ago. But the evidence for such ancient ages is weak, Malin admits. In fact, Nathalie Cabrol (NASA/Ames Research Center) and her colleagues have used Viking images to identify roughly 200 Martian craters with lakebed sediments that she believes were laid down much more recently -- some only few hundred million years ago. "To say they are all ancient, I would be cautious," Cabrol warns. "What would the agent be to expose all these ancient layers in recent times? How do you do that? Maybe they are more recent than Malin and Edgett think, or something happened recently on Mars to exhume them." The crater sediments only add to the new and much more confusing picture of Mars that is emerging from Mars Global Surveyor data. When one observation indicates that the red planet had a warmer, wetter past, another (like widespread outcrops of the mineral olivine) argues for eons of cold, dry conditions. "We caution that the Mars images tell us that the story is actually quite complicated," Edgett notes, "and yet the implications are tremendous." SATURN'S CLAN GROWS BY FOUR The space around Saturn may not be as crowded as New York's La Guardia airport, but Thursday astronomers announced the discovery of four more small Saturnian satellites. The new objects, all between 23rd and 24th magnitude, were first spied on September 23rd by moon-meisters Brett Gladman (Nice Observatory) and J. J. Kavelaars (McMaster University) using the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Follow-up observations in late November by other members of Gladman's team cinched the discoveries, which bring the planet's total up to 28. No firm orbits exist at this time, and for now they've been designated S/2000 S 7 through S/2000 S 10. Additional observations are planned later this month, but the moonlets probably occupy a mix or prograde and retrograde orbits. The team continues to track a few other prospects as well. "During the past year and a half, the number of know outer-planet satellites (or candidate satellites) of the giant planets has more than doubled," observes Brian G. Marsden of the IAU's Minor Planet Center. Details of the new finds appear on IAU Circulars 7538 and 7539. HUBBLE PEERS INTO THE PLEIADES The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a closeup view inside one of the most familiar sights in the Northern Hemisphere's winter skies: the Pleiades star cluster. The image -- made by George Herbig and Theodore Simon (University of Hawaii) with Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on September 19, 1999 -- shows tufts of nebulosity only 30 arcseconds from the Pleiad Merope. (The star lies just off the top of the frame.) Although the Pleiades are thought to be perhaps only 80 million years old, the gas and dust enveloping them are not the remnants their birth. The cloud just happens to be passing by, and this part of it is being eroded by the light from Merope only 0.06 light-year away. E. E. Barnard discovered much larger parts of the Merope cloud in the 19th century; it's now designated IC 349. The Pleiades can easily be seen with the naked eye high in the east these evenings, lying above brilliant Jupiter. You may be able to spot five or six Pleiads with your naked eye -- binoculars and telescopes will reveal dozens more. Yellowish Saturn is off to their right, and orange Aldebaran is below Jupiter. To help guide your way through the evening sky, see the maps for our Monthly Northern Sky Highlights at http://www.skypub.com/sights/northern/northern.html. COMETS IN THE SOUTHERN SKY Comet Utsunomiya-Jones (C/2000 W1) is between 6th and 7th magnitude, and thus easily seen in binoculars, but now it's observable only from the Southern Hemisphere, moving through Sagittarius. It reaches perihelion just inside the orbit of Mercury in late December, but will be behind the Sun. Here are positions for Comet Utsunomiya-Jones for 0 hours Universal Time in 2000.0 coordinates for the coming week: Date R.A. Dec. Dec 9 19h 35m -32.2 deg. Dec 11 19 36 -29.2 Dec 13 19 36 -26.8 Dec 15 19 34 -24.8 A better cross-hemisphere comet is Comet McNaught-Hartley (C/1999 T1). From the Southern Hemisphere, it is about 20 deg. above the eastern horizon just before the first light of dawn. Northern Hemisphere observers may be able to spot it a about 15 degrees above the southeastern horizon before morning twilight. The 8th-magnitude comet continues its trek across Hydra. Here are positions for McNaught-Hartley for 0 hours Universal Time in 2000.0 coordinates for the coming week: Date R.A. Dec. Dec 9 13h 52m -26.3 deg. Dec 11 13 58 -25.3 Dec 13 14 03 -24.3 Dec 15 14 09 -23.3 For more about these comets, see the Special Sky Events page at http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0012skyevents.html . THIS WEEK'S "SKY AT A GLANCE" Some daily events in the changing sky, by the editors of Sky & Telescope. DEC. 10 -- SUNDAY * Full Moon tonight (exact at 4:03 a.m. Eastern Standard Time Monday morning). * The Moon forms a zigzag line in the evening sky with orange Aldebaran, bright Jupiter, and yellowish Saturn, counting in that order toward the Moon's upper right or right. * Jupiter's Great Red Spot should cross Jupiter's central meridian (the imaginary line down the center of the planet's disk from pole to pole) around 7:18 p.m. EST. The "red" spot is very pale orange-tan. It should be visible in a good 4- or 6-inch telescope if the atmospheric seeing is sharp and steady. For a list of all predicted Red Spot transit times, see http://www.skypub.com/sights/moonplanets/redspot.html . DEC. 11 -- MONDAY * The Moon forms a big, roughly equilateral triangle in the evening sky with bright Jupiter to its upper right and Capella to its upper left. * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 1:04 a.m. EST Tuesday morning. DEC. 12 -- TUESDAY * The Geminid meteor shower should be at its peak late this evening and early tomorrow morning. But bright moonlight will hide most of the meteors from view. * The Moon occults (covers) the 3.5-magnitude star Delta Geminorum late tonight as seen from most of North America and Hawaii. For a timetable of the star's reappearance from behind the Moon's thin dark limb -- an event visible with a small telescope if you're watching at the right instant -- see the December Sky & Telescope, page 115, or http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0012skyevents.html . * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 8:56 p.m. EST. * Mars and Spica appear closest together, 3 degrees apart, in the dawn sky Wednesday morning. DEC. 13 -- WEDNESDAY * The winter constellation Orion rises into good view low in the east-southeastern sky by 7:30 or 8 p.m. Look for it looming up far below bright Jupiter and Saturn. DEC. 14 -- THURSDAY * The red long-period variable star R Trianguli should be at its maximum brightness (about 6th magnitude) around this date. * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 10:34 p.m. EST. DEC. 15 -- FRIDAY * After the Moon rises late this evening, look to its right or upper right for Regulus. DEC. 16 -- SATURDAY * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 12:12 a.m. EST Sunday morning. ============================ THIS WEEK'S PLANET ROUNDUP ============================ MERCURY is hidden in the glow of sunrise. VENUS shines very brilliantly (magnitude -4.2) in the southwestern sky during and after dusk. MARS (magnitude +1.5, in Virgo) glows yellow-orange high in the southeast before dawn. Near it shines Spica, slightly brighter at magnitude +1.0. JUPITER and SATURN (magnitudes -2.8 and -0.2, respectively) shine brightly in the east to southeast during evening. Jupiter is the brighter one. Saturn appears 8 or 9 degrees (nearly a fist-width at arm's length) to Jupiter's upper right. They're in the constellation Taurus; above Jupiter is the Pleiades star cluster, and below Jupiter sparkles orange Aldebaran. By 10 p.m. the whole group is high in the south. URANUS and NEPTUNE (invisible to the naked eye, at magnitudes 6 and 8 in Capricornus) are getting very low in the southwest after dark. They're far in the background of Venus. PLUTO is hidden in the glare of the Sun. All descriptions that relate to the horizon or zenith -- including the words up, down, right, and left -- are written for the world's midnorthern latitudes. Descriptions that also depend on longitude are for North America. Eastern Standard Time, EST, equals Universal Time [GMT] minus 5 hours.) More celestial events, sky maps, and news of the world's astronomy research appear each month in SKY & TELESCOPE, the essential magazine of astronomy. See our enormous Web site and astronomy bookstore at http://www.skypub.com/ . Clear skies! SKY & TELESCOPE, 49 Bay State Rd., Cambridge, MA 02138 * 617-864-7360 =========================================================== Copyright 2000 Sky Publishing Corporation. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance stargazing calendar are provided as a service to the astronomical community by the editors of SKY & TELESCOPE magazine. Widespread electronic distribution is encouraged as long as these paragraphs are included. But the text of the bulletin and calendar may not be published in any other form without permission from Sky Publishing (contact permissions@skypub.com or phone 617-864-7360). Updates of astronomical news, including active links to related Internet resources, are available via SKY & TELESCOPE's site on the World Wide Web at http://www.skypub.com/.

NEWSALERT: Monday, December 11, 2000 @ 0551 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now ENDEAVOUR HEADS FOR FLORIDA HOMECOMING TODAY -------------------------------------------- Flush with success, the shuttle Endeavour astronauts are set to close out their mission that spread the power-generating wings of the international space station this evening with a pin-point landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Touchdown on Runway 15 is expected at 2304 GMT (6:04 p.m. EST ). http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/001211fd12/ Continuous live landing updates in our status center: http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/status.html Timeline of today's deorbit preparation: http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/fdf/97entry.html Landing weather forecast: http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/fdf/97wx.html ATLANTIS ROLLOUT DELAYED FOR BOOSTER INSPECTIONS ------------------------------------------------ Rollout of shuttle Atlantis to pad 39A to ready the ship for launch next month will be delayed at least two days -- from Monday to Wednesday -- because of ongoing work to determine why an explosive booster separation bolt failed to fire during the Endeavour's launch Nov. 30. http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/001210sts98/ ARIANE 4 TO ROCKET TURKISH EURASIASAT 1 CRAFT INTO ORBIT -------------------------------------------------------- A Turkish telecommunications satellite built to bridge Europe and Asia is poised for its launch into space later today atop an Arianespace Ariane 4 rocket. Liftoff is set for 2204 GMT (5:04 p.m. EST) from Kourou, South America. We will have live reports: http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v137/status.html LAST WEEK'S ATLAS ROCKET LAUNCH REVISITED ----------------------------------------- Spaceflight Now looks back to last Tuesday's flight of the Lockheed Martin Atlas 2AS rocket with a secret satellite cargo with a gallery of spectacular launch photographs. http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/ac157/launch.html WEEKEND HEADLINES ----------------- FOUR ADDITIONAL MOONS DISCOVERED ORBITING SATURN http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/10saturnmoons/ ASTRONOMERS FIND NEW EVIDENCE FOR MAGNETARS http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/09magnetars/

NEWSALERT: Tuesday, December 12, 2000 @ 0524 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now ENDEAVOUR RETURNS TO EARTH WITH NIGHTTIME LANDING ------------------------------------------------- The space shuttle Endeavour glided to a smooth Florida touchdown Monday evening just minutes after the international space station sailed overhead, closing out a successful flight to equip the outpost with the most powerful solar arrays ever launched. http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/001211land/ Read our play-by-play description of entry and landing: http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/status.html Video clip of Endeavour's landing from NASA Television: http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/video/001211landing_qt.html Video from onboard camera showing pilot's view: http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/video/001211ppov_qt.html Video of landing from infrared camera: http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/video/001211irland_qt.html THREE EXTRASOLAR PLANETS FOUND 150 LIGHT-YEARS AWAY --------------------------------------------------- Three new planets around distant stars have been found by scientists using an observatory in Australia, adding to the 46 other extrasolar planets found since 1995. The new worlds vary in size but are comparable to Jupiter and likely gas giants. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/12planets/ HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS MAKE STELLAR DISCOVERY, WIN AWARD ------------------------------------------------------ Three high school students, using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NSF's Very Large Array, Monday won first place in the Siemens-Westinghouse Science and Technology Competition for discovery of the first evidence of a neutron star in the nearby supernova remnant. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/12chandrakids/ ONE OF NASA'S FEMALE PIONEERS TO RETIRE --------------------------------------- In 1964, Carolyn Griner was one of only three women in technical positions at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center -- outnumbered by male engineers at a ratio of more than 1,000 to one. Today, after 36 years of helping America reach new frontiers in space exploration, Griner, now deputy director of Marshall, has announced plans to retire. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/12griner/ GALILEO CONTINUES PROBING JOVIAN MAGNETOSPHERE ---------------------------------------------- Galileo's efforts continue on maintaining the continuity of a survey of the Jovian magnetosphere. The survey data are very valuable as they are Galileo's contribution to a dual-spacecraft observation campaign to examine the influence of the solar wind on the magnetosphere. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/12galileothisweek/ ARIANE 4 ROCKET LAUNCH OF TURKISH CRAFT DELAYED ----------------------------------------------- Monday's launch of the Arianespace Ariane 4 rocket with the Turkish Eurasiasat 1 communications spacecraft from Kourou in South America was called off and a new date is still pending. http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v137/status.html

NEWSALERT: Wednesday, December 13, 2000 @ 0612 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now JUPITER'S EYE SEEN WATCHING IO IN STUNNING NEW PHOTO ---------------------------------------------------- As NASA's Cassini spacecraft cruises through space, the probe has captured yet another awe-inspiring image of Jupiter. This latest view shows details of the planet's Great Red Spot and other features not seen earlier. Also visible is the Jovian moon Io and the white and reddish colors on its surface. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/13jupio/ BOOSTER INSPECTIONS KEEP SHUTTLE ATLANTIS PARKED ------------------------------------------------ Engineers began inspections of electrical cable connectors in the solid rocket boosters of space shuttle Atlantis on Tuesday in the wake of a problem during the launch of sistership Endeavour two weeks ago. http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/001212sts98/ BLACK HOLES SAID YOUNGER, MEANER AND MORE PLENTIFUL --------------------------------------------------- A team of astronomers has found that supermassive black holes contribute about as much energy to the Universe as all the stars combined. Many have formed recently rather than in the early, violent stages of galaxy birth. And, at any give time in the history of the Universe, about 10 percent of all supermassive black holes are actively pulling in huge quantities of gas and whole stars. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/13chandra/ DOD GETS GLOBAL WITH IRIDIUM SATELLITE-PHONE SYSTEM --------------------------------------------------- The U.S. Department of Defense awarded a two-year, $72 million contract last week for unlimited use of the global Iridium satellite-based, secure telephone network. Details of deal indicate the Pentagon will pay 10 to 30 cents a minute while new civilian commercial service will cost about 80 cents a minute, down from the previous near $5 per minute for some customers. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/13iridium/ FUTURE FRENCH MILITARY COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM SET ------------------------------------------------ Alcatel Space has won the contract to build France's new-generation Syracuse 3A military satellite, plus options for a second and third satellite in the series. Syracuse 3A satellite will enter service in 2003, complementing the current fleet of mixed civil/military spacecraft to serve both French and allied armed forces. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/13syracuse3a/

NEWSALERT: Thursday, December 14, 2000 @ 0450 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now NEW REPORT OFFERS EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE LIFE ON MARS ---------------------------------------------------- A new scientific report offers compelling evidence that primitive life existed on Mars. Tiny magnetite crystals, identical to those used by aqueous bacteria on Earth as compasses to find food and energy, have been found in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/14marslife/ NEW MOVIE NOW SHOWING: 'HIGH CLOUDS OF JUPITER' ----------------------------------------------- Images from NASA's Cassini space probe have been used to generate this new movie of Jupiter's high-altitude clouds. This is the first time a movie sequence of Jupiter has been made that illustrates the motions of the high clouds on a global scale. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/14jupiter/ SHUTTLE DELAY EXTENDS VOYAGE OF FIRST STATION CREW -------------------------------------------------- The first expedition aboard international space station got a little longer on Wednesday when NASA announced a delay from February to March in launching space shuttle Discovery to ferry the three-man crew back to Earth. http://spaceflightnow.com/ops/stage4a/001214sts102/ ENGINE BURN PUTS NEAR SHOEMAKER ON FINAL TRACK ---------------------------------------------- An engine firing yesterday put NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft in orbit just 22 miles above the tumbling space rock Eros' center of mass in preparation for low altitude operations in January and February, just prior to the mission's end. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/14nearburn/

I thought we'd known about the Mars meteorite for a while, this isn't "news" per se, is it?

Not as far as I know. Did not check the link to see what new tests it was undergoing. I shall, though, and post what I discover.

=========================================================== SKY & TELESCOPE'S NEWS BULLETIN - DECEMBER 15, 2000 =========================================================== For images and Web links for these items, visit http://www.skypub.com =========================================================== Axel Mellinger's composite image of the entire Milky Way was so stunning that we made it into a poster. Now, not only is there a 2nd Edition of his quick-selling panorama, Mellinger has imaged the polar regions as well to create a spectacular all-sky view. The 24-by-36- inch "Celestial Sphere" poster consists of 51 wide-angle exposures stitched together into a seamless "real" map of the entire sky. The poster comes with a key chart identifying major constellations and stars. To order either of Mellinger's posters, visit Sky Publishing's online store at http://store.skypub.com/ or call 800-253-0245. =========================================================== HUBBLE AND CASSINI TEAM UP ON JUPITER Yesterday marked the start of a two-week-long observing campaign by the Hubble Space Telescope and Cassini spacecraft to monitor auroral activity on Jupiter. Cassini is nearing the solar system's largest planet on its way to a 2004 appointment with Saturn, and scientists are taking full advantage of this month's opportunity. The spacecraft will pass 9.8 million kilometers from Jupiter on December 30th. Shortly after the flyby, the dual observations will recommence, as Hubble will image Jupiter's day side and Cassini will watch the planet's night side. Astronomers hope to obtain a better understanding of the interaction of the solar wind with Jupiter's magnetic field and create a model of the planet's aurora. To illustrate what Hubble and Cassini will be looking for, the Space Telescope Science Institute released a detailed view of Jupiter's north pole surrounded by aurora. The picture -- taken on November 26, 1998 -- features auroral "footprints" of Io, Ganymede, and Europa. These are artifacts of the electric fields generated as the satellites move through Jupiter's magnetosphere. AN ALL-SKY OPTICAL SETI SURVEY A new kind search for intelligent life in the universe is in the making. Paul Horowitz (Harvard University) and his graduate students Andrew Howard and Chip Coldwell have begun building a specialized, 72-inch (1.8-meter) telescope that will sweep more than half the celestial sphere to look for extremely brief laser pulses from other civilizations. Recent studies indicate that lasers could be as efficient as radio for interstellar signaling. Following up on this idea, several optical SETI projects are already under way (including one by Horowitz's group) or are being built. But these are "targeted" searches looking only at preselected lists of a few thousand stars at most. The new wide-sky survey will take at least brief looks at hundreds of millions. The telescope's main mirror will be a cheap "light bucket" of low optical quality. At the heart of the instrument will be two parallel arrays of 1,024 high-speed photomultipliers each. These will observe a 1.6 degree-by-0.2 degree swath of sky at once. Only recently have such arrays become available. They will be able to resolve light pulses as short as a nanosecond (a billionth of a second). Any such brief pulses from the stars would be clearly artificial and would represent an energy-efficient way to communicate across thousands of light-years. The $350,000 project is being funded by The Planetary Society. Half the amount has been put up as a matching grant by one donor, David Brown, and the society is canvassing its members for the rest. Horowitz says the instrument will examine every point on more than half the celestial sphere for at least 48 seconds every 150 clear nights. It will sweep the whole sky from declination +60 degrees to -20 degrees, a zone that includes more than half of the visible Milky Way. If all goes well observations should begin in late 2001 or 2002. For a description of all the radio and optical SETI searches under way worldwide, and a comprehensive review of today's debate over intelligent life in the universe, see Sky & Telescope's SETI Page at http://www.skypub.com/news/special/seti_toc.html . CHRISTMAS ECLIPSE Christmas Day will be extra special this year. Weather permitting, people all across North America will be able to watch the Moon glide across the low December Sun, creating a partial solar eclipse. This event will be visible throughout nearly all the inhabited parts of North America (except Alaska and the Yukon), as well as from most of Mexico and the Caribbean. To find out when the eclipse will occur, how much of the Sun will be covered from your location, and how to observe it safely, see Sky & Telescope's Web site at http://www.skypub.com/sights/eclipses/solar/001225partial.html . COMET MCNAUGHT-HARTLEY IN THE MORNING Although it is the brightest comet in the sky right now -- between 6th and 7th magnitude -- Comet Utsunomiya-Jones (C/2000 W1) has moved closer to the Sun, heading toward its perihelion on December 26th. By the time the last of evening twilight has faded, the comet is only a few degrees above the horizon. To see the next-best comet, you'll have to head out early in the morning. Comet McNaught-Hartley (C/1999 T1) is highest -- between 15 and 20 deg. above the horizon -- just before the first light of dawn. At that time, Northern Hemisphere observers will find it in the southeast, while Southern Hemisphere observers will find it in the south. The 8th-magnitude comet moves nearly due north through Virgo and enters Libra this coming week. Here are positions for McNaught-Hartley for 0 hours Universal Time in 2000.0 coordinates: Date R.A. Dec. Dec 16 14h 12m -22.7 deg. Dec 18 14 17 -21.6 Dec 20 14 23 -20.5 Dec 22 14 28 -19.3 For more about these comets, see the Special Sky Events page at http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0012skyevents.html . THIS WEEK'S "SKY AT A GLANCE" Some daily events in the changing sky, by the editors of Sky & Telescope. DEC. 17 -- SUNDAY * Last-quarter Moon (exact at 7:41 p.m. EST). * Jupiter's Great Red Spot should cross Jupiter's central meridian (the imaginary line down the center of the planet's disk from pole to pole) around 8:03 p.m. EST. The "red" spot is currently very pale orange-tan. It should be visible in a good 4- or 6-inch telescope if the atmospheric seeing is sharp and steady. For a list of all predicted Red Spot transit times, see http://www.skypub.com/sights/moonplanets/redspot.html . DEC. 18 -- MONDAY * Some doorstep astronomy: The brilliant light in the southwest just dusk is Venus. The brightest star higher in the northwest is Vega. Just about halfway between them (due west), look for Altair. * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 1:50 a.m. EST Tuesday morning. * Before and during dawn tomorrow morning, the Moon shines above orange Mars and blue-white Spica high in the southeastern sky. DEC. 19 -- TUESDAY * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 9:41 p.m. EST. * The Moon shines in a line with Mars and Spica high in the southeast before and during dawn tomorrow. DEC. 20 -- WEDNESDAY * By about 6:30 p.m. Orion has already cleared the eastern horizon. Look for it far below bright Jupiter and Saturn. DEC. 21 -- THURSDAY * The Sun reaches the solstice at 8:37 a.m. EST, marking the start of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and summer in the Southern Hemisphere. * An unusual outburst of the normally weak Ursid meteor shower is possible late tonight for meteor watchers in North America. The shower's radiant is in the bowl of the Little Dipper. * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 11:19 p.m. EST. * Early tomorrow morning the asteroid 6 Hebe should occult (cover) a 10.8-magnitude star in Virgo for up to 10 seconds. The combined light of the star and asteroid will drop by only 0.9 magnitude. The occultation should take place within a few minutes of 10:58 Universal Time December 22 along a track from Oregon to New England. For a finder chart see the December Sky & Telescope, page 115, or http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0012skyevents.html . For late updates check www.lunar-occultations.com/iota . DEC. 22 -- FRIDAY * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 7:11 p.m. EST. DEC. 23 -- SATURDAY * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 12:57 p.m. EST Sunday morning. ============================ THIS WEEK'S PLANET ROUNDUP ============================ MERCURY is hidden in the glare of the Sun. VENUS shines very brilliantly (magnitude -4.2) in the southwestern sky during and after dusk. Look well to its left (by about three fist-widths at arm's length) for the 1st-magnitude star Fomalhaut. MARS (magnitude +1.5, in Virgo) glows yellow-orange high in the southeast before dawn. Near it (to the right) shines Spica, slightly brighter at magnitude +1.0. JUPITER and SATURN (magnitudes -2.8 and -0.2, respectively) shine brightly in the east to southeast during evening. Jupiter is the brighter one. Saturn appears 8 degrees (a little less than a fist-width at arm's length) to Jupiter's right or upper right. They're in the constellation Taurus; above Jupiter is the Pleiades star cluster, and below Jupiter sparkles orange Aldebaran. By 9:30 p.m. the whole group is high in the south. URANUS and NEPTUNE (invisible to the naked eye, at magnitudes 6 and 8 in Capricornus) are getting very low in the southwest just after dark. They're far in the background of Venus. PLUTO is hidden in the glare of the Sun. (All descriptions that relate to the horizon or zenith -- including the words up, down, right, and left -- are written for the world's midnorthern latitudes. Descriptions that also depend on longitude are for North America. Eastern Standard Time, EST, equals Universal Time [GMT] minus 5 hours.) More celestial events, sky maps, and news of the world's astronomy research appear each month in SKY & TELESCOPE, the essential magazine of astronomy. See our enormous Web site and astronomy bookstore at http://www.skypub.com/ . Clear skies! SKY & TELESCOPE, 49 Bay State Rd., Cambridge, MA 02138 * 617-864-7360 =========================================================== Copyright 2000 Sky Publishing Corporation. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance stargazing calendar are provided as a service to the astronomical community by the editors of SKY & TELESCOPE magazine. Widespread electronic distribution is encouraged as long as these paragraphs are included. But the text of the bulletin and calendar may not be published in any other form without permission from Sky Publishing (contact permissions@skypub.com or phone 617-864-7360). Updates of astronomical news, including active links to related Internet resources, are available via SKY & TELESCOPE's site on the World Wide Web at http://www.skypub.com/. In cooperation with the American Association of Amateur Astronomers (http://www.corvus.com/), S&T's Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance are available via electronic mailing list. For a free subscription, send e-mail to join@astromax.com and put the word "join" on the first line of the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send e-mail to unjoin@astromax.com and put the word "unjoin" on the first line of the body of the message. If you should have any problems either subscribing to or unsubscribing from the list, send a message to list administrator John Wagoner at stargate@gte.net for assistance.

NEWSALERT: Monday, December 18, 2000 @ 0531 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now OCEAN BELIEVED HIDDEN ON SOLAR SYSTEM'S LARGEST MOON ---------------------------------------------------- Add Jupiter's moon Ganymede, which is bigger than two of the solar system's nine planets, to the growing list of worlds with evidence of liquid water under the surface. A thick layer of melted, salty water somewhere beneath Ganymede's icy crust would be the best way to explain some of the magnetic readings taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/17ganymedeocean/ BOOSTER REPAIRS THREATEN TO DELAY NEXT SHUTTLE LAUNCH ----------------------------------------------------- Launch of the shuttle Atlantis next month on the next space station assembly mission faces a potentially significant delay because of work required to fix a crumbling electrical cable in the shuttle's booster separation system. Workers may be forced to remove Atlantis and its external fuel tank to complete the repair job. http://spaceflightnow.com/station/stage5a/001218srb/ Watch our NEW status center for developing news today: http://spaceflightnow.com/station/status.html DETAILS EMERGE AS IRIDIUM'S TRANSFER OF POWER WRAPS UP ------------------------------------------------------ The new company pumping life into the once-defunct Iridium satellite telephone system plans to relaunch the global communications service within the next couple of months. Plans also call for seven more spacecraft to be launched into the constellation. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/18iridium/ MAGNETIC FIELD 'UMBRELLAS' SHIELD MARTIAN ATMOSPHERE ---------------------------------------------------- Though Mars lacks a global protective magnetic shield like that of the Earth, strong localized magnetic fields embedded in the crust appear to be a significant barrier to erosion of the atmosphere by the solar wind, according to a new map by the Mars Global Surveyor. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/17marsmagnet/ ARIANE 508 ROCKET TO LAUNCH 3 PAYLOADS TUESDAY NIGHT ---------------------------------------------------- A mighty Ariane 5 rocket has taken center stage at the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, where satellite troubles have sidelined an Ariane 4 launcher once poised for blastoff a week ago. Workers are now gearing up to launch a pair of communications satellites and a crucial Japanese experiment Tuesday evening on the Ariane 508 vehicle. http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v138/status.html

NEWSALERT: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 @ 0630 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now INTRICATE STRUCTURES SEEN IN JUPITER'S POLAR REGION --------------------------------------------------- The familiar banded appearance of Jupiter at low and middle latitudes gradually gives way to a more mottled appearance at high latitudes in this striking true color image taken last week by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/19jupmott/ MOST DISTANT SPACECRAFT MAY REACH SHOCK ZONE SOON ------------------------------------------------- A NASA spacecraft headed out of the solar system at a speed that would streak from New York to Los Angeles in less than four minutes could reach the first main feature of the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space within three years. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/19voyager1/ ARIANE 5 LAUNCH TO CLOSE OUT 2000 FOR ARIANESPACE ------------------------------------------------- The European Ariane 508 rocket is sitting on its South American launch pad and awaiting liftoff with two communications satellites and an experimental technology demonstration tonight at 0026 GMT (7:26 p.m. EST). We will have comprehensive live launch coverage. http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v138/status.html ANDROMEDA GALAXY COMES ALIVE WITH DETAILED SPYING ------------------------------------------------- The Andromeda galaxy, only 2.6 million light years away, is an ideal field of study for X-ray astronomy. XMM-Newton has observed its galactic center, revealing many new point sources and the probable presence of a very hot diffuse gas which contributes to the overall X-ray luminosity. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/19xmmdiffuse/ NO OFFICIAL DECISION YET ON SHUTTLE BOOSTER REPAIR -------------------------------------------------- NASA officials have yet to select a plan to repair solid rocket booster cabling on space shuttle Atlantis. The repair plan chosen will impact the shuttle's scheduled January 18 launch date on a mission to deliver the Destiny research module to the international space station. http://spaceflightnow.com/station/status.html SOYUZ PICKED TO LAUNCH EUROPEAN WEATHER SATELLITES -------------------------------------------------- EUMETSAT has signed a contract with Starsem for the launch of its Metop polar orbiting satellites. The launch of the first satellite of three in the Metop series, part of the EUMETSAT Polar System, is planned for 2005. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/19eumetsat/

NEWSALERT: Thursday, December 21, 2000 @ 1629 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now PROBLEM HITS CASSINI JUST DAYS BEFORE JUPITER FLYBY --------------------------------------------------- The Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft suspended its observations of Jupiter on Wednesday because of troubles with its pointing system, ending the much-anticipated picture-taking and research as the probe heads to a close encounter with the giant gas planet next week. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/21cassproblem/ IO CASTS SHADOW ON JUPITER IN CASSINI'S BEST IMAGE YET ------------------------------------------------------ Jupiter's four largest satellites, including Io, the golden ornament in front of Jupiter in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, have fascinated Earthlings ever since Galileo Galilei discovered them in 1610 in one of his first astronomical uses of the telescope. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/21jupio/ NASA REVIVES PLUTO MISSION -------------------------- Bowing to pressure from both the scientific community and the general public, NASA gave new life Wednesday to prospects for a Pluto mission, saying it would solicit proposals for a revised mission to the outermost planet in our solar system. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/21pluto/ LANDING SITE SELECTED FOR BEAGLE 2 MISSION TO MARS -------------------------------------------------- The European Space Agency's Mars Express lander, Beagle 2, will land on Isidis Planitia, a large flat region that overlies the boundary between the ancient highlands and the northern plains of the Red Planet. The region appears to be a sedimentary basin where traces of life could have been preserved. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/21beagle2/ CHINESE NAVIGATION SATELLITE LAUNCHED INTO SPACE ------------------------------------------------ China launched the "Beidou" navigation satellite today aboard a Long March 3A rocket from the Xichang space center in the southwest province of Sichuan, the Xinhua news agency reported. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/21beidou/

They better get that Pluto flight off withing two years or the window shuts down as Pluto gets very far away, like it wasn't far already! Man, how many *years* will that take to get there? And how will they pump a signal back? What a feat to pull off. And they have to do it on the cheap.

Too bad about Casini.

It has to be done very carefullly, for certain. Smoke and mirrors just don't hack it anymore! It is fixed!! See below: NEWSALERT: Friday, December 22, 2000 @ 0604 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now CASSINI'S POINTING SYSTEM PROBLEM APPEARS FIXED ----------------------------------------------- A glitch with the pointing system aboard NASA's Cassini space probe appeared to be resolved on Thursday, giving scientists optimism the craft could resume observations of the planet Jupiter during next Saturday's flyby. Cassini is on a 2.2-billion mile, seven-year interplanetary trek to Saturn. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/22cassini/ NASA RELEASES JUPITER FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH MOONS ------------------------------------------------ One moment in an ancient, orbital dance is caught in this color picture taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on December 7, just as two of Jupiter's four major moons, Europa and Callisto, were nearly perfectly aligned with each other and the center of the planet. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/22cassmoons/ REDOCKING OF STATION CARGO SHIP WILL BE TRICKY AFFAIR ----------------------------------------------------- Russian flight controllers - and ultimately, cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko - will have overall control authority during the upcoming redocking of a Progress supply to the international space station Tuesday. U.S flight controllers will only provide oversight and make a video conferencing system available. http://spaceflightnow.com/station/stage5a/001221update/ See our timeline of the redocking sequence: http://spaceflightnow.com/station/stage5a/fdf/redocking.html SPACE TELESCOPE RENAMED FOR BRITISH ASTRONOMER ---------------------------------------------- Astronomers from around the world met in Toledo, Spain, earlier this month to discuss new scientific objectives for Europe's next-generation infrared space observatory. By the time the workshop was over, the telescope had a new name and redefined mission goals. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/22herschel/

Casini's back today! Great!

SKY & TELESCOPE'S NEWS BULLETIN - DECEMBER 22, 2000 =========================================================== For images and Web links for these items, visit http://www.skypub.com =========================================================== Axel Mellinger's composite image of the entire Milky Way was so stunning that we made it into a poster. Now, not only is there a 2nd Edition of his quick-selling panorama, Mellinger has imaged the polar regions as well to create a spectacular all-sky view. The 24-by-36- inch "Celestial Sphere" poster consists of 51 wide-angle exposures stitched together into a seamless "real" map of the entire sky. The poster comes with a key chart identifying major constellations and stars. To order either of Mellinger's posters, visit Sky Publishing's online store at http://store.skypub.com/ or call 800-253-0245. =========================================================== PLUTO MISSION BACK IN PLAY NASA officials announced on Wednesday that the space agency will again consider sending a spacecraft to Pluto. The space agency will seek proposals for mission designs in three weeks, with an eye toward selecting a winning proposal later next year. The mission plan must be developed soon in order to launch the probe by 2004 (2006 at the latest) and thus take advantage of a speed-boosting flyby of Jupiter. That could get the spacecraft to its distant destination by 2012. In making the announcement, NASA associate administrator Edward J. Weiler said he'll consider proposals for craft that would reach Pluto by 2015, whether or not a Jupiter flyby was involved, but the total cost must be well below $500 million. "This is probably our last chance to go to Pluto for a generation," Weiler noted. However, he cautioned repeatedly that there is no guarantee that a spacecraft will actually be built and launched. Still, his announcement was a dramatic change from his precipitous order last September to stop all work related to the proposed Pluto-Kuiper Express mission. The space agency had combined missions to Europa and Pluto in 1997 under a single program that shared development funds and technical expertise. But when steeply escalating costs threatened both efforts in mid-2000, Weiler opted to defer the Pluto mission indefinitely so that work could continue on the Europa orbiter. The back-to-the-drawing-board announcement came after months of lobbying by outer-planet specialists. Key to the turnaround was a late-November report by NASA's Solar System Exploration Subcommittee that recommended going to Pluto before Europa. The latter mission has higher scientific priority overall, but Pluto's atmosphere may soon freeze out as the icy world drifts farther from the Sun. Weiler said the Europa orbiter will be developed regardless of the Pluto mission's outcome, and that it will be launched no later than 2011. Meanwhile, the results of a nationwide survey, also released on Wednesday, show that the U.S. public supports the exploration of two fascinating bodies in the outer solar system. Sponsored by Sky & Telescope, the poll found that 64 percent of Americans want NASA to send a spacecraft to Europa, while 58 percent approve sending a probe to Pluto. The exploration of Mars also continues to receive strong support, as 70 percent of people would like to see samples of the red planet returned to Earth for analysis. (Details of the nationwide poll can be found at http://www.skypub.com/news/pr_001220planetpoll.html .) "We all learn in school that our solar system has nine planets," says Richard Tresch Fienberg, Sky & Telescope's editor in chief. "It's downright dissatisfying that one of them remains unvisited after 40 years of interplanetary exploration." Fienberg encourages NASA to mount a Pluto mission in an editorial appearing in the magazine's February 2000 issue at Sky & Telescope's Web site at http://www.skypub.com/news/images2000/pr_001220planetpoll.pdf . ROGER W. TUTHILL, 1919-2000 Long-time amateur astronomer and entrepreneur Roger W. Tuthill of Mountainside, New Jersey, died of heart failure on December 15th following a brief illness. He was 81. Known to myriad friends and acquaintances as Tut, it was a midlife look at the Moon through a telescope in 1960 that ignited his lasting passion for astronomy. During the ensuing decade he became an increasingly well-known amateur astronomer, publishing several important articles on telescope making in Sky & Telescope. With one of the century's longest total solar eclipses pending and organized eclipse travel almost nonexistent, Tut led a large group of amateurs to Africa's western Sahara Desert in the summer of 1973. During a preliminary scouting trip he planned to thwart the desert's intense daytime heat with a tent he made of aluminized Mylar. The experiment failed because of the tent's "maddeningly annoying" noise as it rippled in the ever-present wind. But sitting inside and looking up, Tut discovered that aluminized Mylar was a safe and effective solar filter. Sliced into small strips, pieces of the tent were handed out as free eclipse viewers to hundreds of locals in a practice he continued during 17 future eclipse expeditions. Tut patented aluminized Mylar as a solar filter and founded a small company to sell his Solar Skreen to amateurs. Eventually he added other products and quit his day job as an engineer at a welding company to run the business full time. Tut presaged the future when he introduced the first computer-pointed amateur telescope in the early 1980s, though the unit was never a commercial success. Tuthill's business was scaled back in recent years as he entered semiretirement. According to his wife, Nancy, the business will continue selling Solar Skreen and other small products. Tut was proactive in his support of several amateur organizations, including the Springfield Telescope Makers in Vermont, where he was a fixture at the club's annual Stellafane convention for three decades. For the thousands of amateurs who met Tut there and at other gatherings in North America or during his globetrotting eclipse expeditions, he will be best remembered for his strong handshake and warm, smiling greeting whether he was meeting someone for the first or 500th time. He truly was, as his company's slogan proclaimed, everyone's astronomical friend. GEORGE E. D. ALCOCK, 1912-2000 The world lost one of its foremost amateur astronomers with the death of George Eric Deacon Alcock on December 15th. He was 88. A schoolteacher from Peterborough, England, Alcock blazed into the annals of British astronomy in 1959 by discovering Comet 1959e on August 25th of that year using a pair of Zeiss 25x105 binoculars. It was the first comet discovered in the country in 65 years. Five days later, on August 30th, he swept up his second one, Comet 1959f. Despite Britain's frequently cloudy skies and increasing light pollution, Alcock went on to visually discover three more comets and five novae. His last comet discovery in 1983 was his most famous -- Comet IRAS-Araki-Alcock. He found it with 15x80 binoculars while observing indoors, through the closed, double-glazed window of his upstairs bedroom! On May 11th the naked-eye comet skimmed past the Earth at only 12 times the Moon's distance (about 4.5 million kilometers), closer than any other cometary visitor since Comet Lexell in 1770. Alcock's discoveries put him in a class with another renowned English amateur, Caroline Herschel, who had a lifetime total of eight comet finds from 1786 to 1797. An avid weather observer and bird watcher, Alcock received major awards from astronomical organizations, including the naming of asteroid 3174 Alcock in his honor by the International Astronomical Union. A profile of him can be found in the May 1999 issue of Sky & Telescope (page 84). CHRISTMAS ECLIPSE Christmas Day will be extra special this year. Weather permitting, people in North America will be able to watch the Moon glide across the low December Sun, creating a partial solar eclipse. This event will be visible throughout nearly all the inhabited parts of North America (except Alaska and the Yukon), as well as from most of Mexico and the Caribbean. To find out when the eclipse will occur, how much of the Sun will be covered from your location, and how to observe it safely, see Sky & Telescope's Web site at http://www.skypub.com/sights/eclipses/solar/001225partial.html . COMET MCNAUGHT-HARTLEY IN THE MORNING Although Comet Utsunomiya-Jones (C/2000 W1) is the brightest comet in the sky right now, it is too close to the Sun to be seen. It reaches perihelion on December 26th. You have a much better chance to see the next-best comet, but you'll have to wake up early. This coming week, Eighth-magnitude Comet McNaught-Hartley (C/1999 T1) climbs some 20 to 30 deg. above the southeastern horizon before the first light of dawn for Northern Hemisphere observers. For those south of the equator, the comet will be about 20 to 25 deg. above the eastern horizon. Here are positions for McNaught-Hartley as it moves through Libra for 0 hours Universal Time in 2000.0 coordinates: Date R.A. Dec. Dec 23 14h 31m -18.7 deg. Dec 25 14 37 -17.5 Dec 27 14 42 -16.2 Dec 29 14 48 -14.9 For more about these comets, see the Special Sky Events page at http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0012skyevents.html . THIS WEEK'S "SKY AT A GLANCE" Some daily events in the changing sky, by the editors of Sky & Telescope. DEC. 24 -- SUNDAY * Turn a telescope on Jupiter around 6:30 to 7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, and you'll find its outer moons Ganymede and Callisto quite close together, just 12 arcseconds apart. They remain close all evening. * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 8:49 p.m. EST. * Tonight the 13th-magnitude asteroid 162 Laurentia should occult (cover) a 10.5-magnitude star in Auriga along a strip of land crossing the Deep South. The occultation should happen a few minutes after 11:00 p.m. EST and should last for up to 9 seconds. Use the finder chart in the December Sky & Telescope, page 116, or at http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0012skyevents.html . * The naked-eye eclipsing variable star Algol should be in one of its periodic dimmings, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours tonight centered on 12:37 a.m. EST (Christmas morning). Algol takes several additional hours to fade and to brighten. For a timetable of all its predicted minima, see http://www.skypub.com/sights/variables/algol.html . DEC. 25 -- MONDAY * A PARTIAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN happens this Christmas Day for nearly all of North America (except Alaska and the Yukon) and most of Mexico and the Caribbean. The eclipse takes place around sunrise in the American Northwest and western Canada, a little later after sunup in the Southwest and mountain states, during late morning or midday in the central part of the continent, and during early afternoon in the East. Full details, including a timetable with your local predictions and how to watch safely, are in the December Sky & Telescope, page 109, and at http://www.skypub.com/sights/eclipses/solar/001225partial.html . DEC. 26 -- TUESDAY * Some doorstep astronomy: The bright constellations of winter are enlivened by Jupiter and Saturn this year. Jupiter is currently the brightest light in the east to southeast during evening. Saturn is to its right. Far to their left is the constellation Auriga with its bright star Capella. About the same distance below Jupiter is Orion. Similarly far below Orion is Canis Major with bright Sirius, rising around midevening. * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 10:27 p.m. EST. DEC. 27 -- WEDNESDAY * Algol should be near minimum light for a couple hours centered on 9:26 p.m. EST. DEC. 28 -- THURSDAY * Look southwest at dusk for the crescent Moon shining to the lower right of Venus, the bright "Evening Star." * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 11:59 p.m. EST. DEC. 29 -- FRIDAY * VENUS SHINES CLOSE TO THE CRESCENT MOON in the southwestern sky during and after dusk -- a beautiful conjunction. * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 7:57 p.m. EST. DEC. 30 -- SATURDAY * The Moon shines to Venus's upper left this evening. * Algol should be near minimum light for a couple hours centered on 6:15 p.m. EST. * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 1:37 a.m. EST Sunday morning. ============================ THIS WEEK'S PLANET ROUNDUP ============================ MERCURY is hidden in the glare of the Sun. VENUS shines very brilliantly (magnitude -4.2) in the southwestern sky during and after dusk. Look well to its left or lower left (by two or three fist-widths at arm's length) for the much dimmer, 1st-magnitude star Fomalhaut. MARS (magnitude +1.5, in Virgo) glows yellow-orange high in the southeast before dawn. To its right shines Spica, slightly brighter at magnitude +1.0. JUPITER and SATURN (magnitudes -2.7 and -0.2, respectively) shine brightly in the east to southeast during early evening. Jupiter is the brighter one. Saturn appears 8 degrees (less than a fist-width at arm's length) to Jupiter's right or upper right. They're in the constellation Taurus; above Jupiter is the Pleiades star cluster, and below Jupiter sparkles orange Aldebaran. By 9 p.m. the whole group is high in the south. URANUS and NEPTUNE (invisible to the naked eye, at magnitudes 6 and 8 in Capricornus) are getting very low in the southwest just after dark. They're far in the background of Venus. PLUTO is hidden in the glow of sunrise. (All descriptions that relate to the horizon or zenith -- including the words up, down, right, and left -- are written for the world's midnorthern latitudes. Descriptions that also depend on longitude are for North America. Eastern Standard Time, EST, equals Universal Time [GMT] minus 5 hours.) More celestial events, sky maps, and news of the world's astronomy research appear each month in SKY & TELESCOPE, the essential magazine of astronomy. See our enormous Web site and astronomy bookstore at http://www.skypub.com/ . Clear skies! SKY & TELESCOPE, 49 Bay State Rd., Cambridge, MA 02138 * 617-864-7360 =========================================================== Copyright 2000 Sky Publishing Corporation. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance stargazing calendar are provided as a service to the astronomical community by the editors of SKY & TELESCOPE magazine. Widespread electronic distribution is encouraged as long as these paragraphs are included. But the text of the bulletin and calendar may not be published in any other form without permission from Sky Publishing (contact permissions@skypub.com or phone 617-864-7360). Updates of astronomical news, including active links to related Internet resources, are available via SKY & TELESCOPE's site on the World Wide Web at http://www.skypub.com/. In cooperation with the American Association of Amateur Astronomers (http://www.corvus.com/), S&T's Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance are available via electronic mailing list. For a free subscription, send e-mail to join@astromax.com and put the word "join" on the first line of the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send e-mail to unjoin@astromax.com and put the word "unjoin" on the first line of the body of the message. If you should have any problems either subscribing to or unsubscribing from the list, send a message to list administrator John Wagoner at stargate@gte.net for assistance. ---------------------------------------------------------------------

Check this url for next time (thanks, JSK) http://www.mreclipse.com/Totality/TotalityCh12-1.html#Right_Filter CHRISTMAS SOLAR ECLIPSE Eclipse 1 was a pinhole projection. Eclipse 2 was at the sun through a special eclipse-viewing silvered plastic. Photos by HFL December 25, 2000

thanks for these great pics!

My sister reportd in from Long Island, New York that she saw the eclipse much as did HFL in the images above. Did anyone else see it???

" NEW YORK, UNITED STATES, 25-DEC-2000: A pair of pinhole projected images of the partial solar eclipse are projected on to a piece of paper (with cartoon face drawn on) to form what looks like eyes on a happy face on Dec. 25, 2000 in New York. The solar eclipse could be viewed on Christmas Day in parts of North America. [Photo by Don Emmert, copyright 2000 by AFP and ClariNet]" Thanks HFL for sending this - very clever!!!

University of Hawaii astronomers have detected the destruction of a dark interstellar cloud by one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades cluster. George Herbig and Theodore Simon, with the Institute for Astronomy, obtained high-resolution images in September with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Pleiades, a famous navigational signpost for Hawaiians, formed about 100 million years ago from interstellar clouds, Herbig explained. The small group of bright blue stars is named for the Seven Sisters of Greek mythology. Easily seen in the night sky during winter months, the cluster resembles a small dipper, lying in the constellation Taurus about 380 light years from Earth. "Moving through space, it shed all the material from which it was born, but if you look at it from photographs, it is covered with dusty clouds," Herbig said. "Stars shine on the clouds and create luminosity. "So it's kind of like a star seen through frosted glass. It's covered with smoky stuff, which is really dust illuminated by stars." Not far from Pleiades is a big dark cloud of cold gas and dust, Herbig said. "It just happens that Pleiades, by pure accident, is passing through the edge of the dust cloud, like an airplane." One little piece of cloud happens to be close to the bright Pleiades star Merope, which is reflecting light off the black clouds like a flashlight beam, Herbig said. American astronomer E.E. Barnard discovered bright nebulosity next to Merope in 1890. "Barnard's Merope Nebula" is the brightest place in the conglomeration of dust around Pleiades, Herbig said. "It just happens that the brightest reflection of nebula luminosity is not shown on ordinary photographs. This little glob of stuff ... that's what we studied." The Hubble image doesn't show Merope itself but caught wispy tendrils of the interstellar cloud passing by the bright star. No one has ever been able to measure the motion of dust clouds because they're so amorphous, Herbig said. "But it turns out it's possible to associate a position and motion of this little glob of stuff, Merope nebula, with the motion of dark clouds nearby." Thus, he said, he and Simon were able to map the approach of Pleiades to the unrelated mass of dust of interstellar material. The star is so close and shining on the dust with such intensity that it is starting to fray and dissipate, Herbig said. The same phenomenon is at work with Merope and the interstellar cloud as occurs with comet tails, he explained. "We see dust tails of comets blown away from the comet's head by radiation pressure of the sun, because it exerts a force. It can drive the dust back in the opposite direction." Space telescope images show radiation pressure from Merope also is destroying the cloud, Herbig said. In a couple of thousand years, as it gets closer to the star, the nebula may be blown apart completely, he said. "Or, it may be just like comets that go past the sun repeatedly and lose dust." People have always thought dust clouds were structureless masses of gas and dust, Herbig said. "This picture has shown us there is fine structure, all full of filaments and ridges and globs." Like leaves of trees that have veins and structure, he said, "it looks like structure inside these interstellar clouds. This is something we didn't appreciate before."

=========================================================== SKY & TELESCOPE'S NEWS BULLETIN - DECEMBER 29, 2000 =========================================================== For images and Web links for these items, visit http://www.skypub.com =========================================================== Axel Mellinger's composite image of the entire Milky Way was so stunning that we made it into a poster. Now, not only is there a 2nd Edition of his quick-selling panorama, Mellinger has imaged the polar regions as well to create a spectacular all-sky view. The 24-by-36- inch "Celestial Sphere" poster consists of 51 wide-angle exposures stitched together into a seamless "real" map of the entire sky. The poster comes with a key chart identifying major constellations and stars. To order either of Mellinger's posters, visit Sky Publishing's online store at http://store.skypub.com/ or call 800-253-0245. =========================================================== SATURN'S SATELLITES: 30 AND COUNTING Brett Gladman (Nice Observatory) and his international observing partners have announced their discovery of two more moons around Saturn. One of the new finds, designated S/2000 S 11, was spotted on November 9th by team member Matthew Holman with the 1.2-meter reflector at Whipple Observatory in Arizona. Gladman and J. J. Kavelaars (McMaster University) spotted S/2000 S 12 on September 23rd using the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea. It is probably only 5 kilometers across, whereas S 11 has a diameter of perhaps 35 km. Counting these additions, Saturn now has 30 known moons -- 19 of which were found in the past 20 years. The dozen discovered by Gladman's team appear to fall into three orbital groupings: most travel in the same direction that Saturn rotates and have orbital inclinations that cluster near 35 and 48 deg.; the third group travels in the reverse (retrograde) direction with inclinations near 170 deg. "The situation of Saturn thus seems to resemble that of Jupiter," Gladman notes, "which also has one prograde and one retrograde cluster." A WARMER EARLY UNIVERSE The Big Bang is one of the most widely known and debated theories in cosmology. Most theorists assume the explosion was hot, and that the universe has since cooled dramatically. Although we know the current temperature of remnant Big Bang radiation, called the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), until now, no one has made a direct measurement of the temperature of ancient Big Bang radiation. Today, the background radiation is only 2.7 deg. Kelvin, but theoretically the farther back in time we look, the hotter the CMBR should be. Using the 8.2-meter Kueyen reflector of the Very Large Telescope in Chile, Raghunathan Srianand (Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics), Patrick Petitjean (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris) and Cedric Ledoux (European Southern Observatory) were able to measure the temperature of the CMBR when the universe was only 2.5 billion years old. They found that back then the cosmos was between 6 and 14 deg. Kelvin. The team's results -- announced in the December 21st issue of Nature -- came from observations of the distant quasar PKS 1235+0815. By examining at the object's spectrum, the astronomers found the signatures of carbon and hydrogen that only occur at these specific temperatures. Their result is in line with other theorists who predicted that the CMBR should be 9.7 deg. K at that cosmic era. COMET MCNAUGHT-HARTLEY IN THE MORNING If you got new binoculars or a telescope for Christmas, try training it on the 8th-magnitude Comet McNaught-Hartley (C/1999 T1). The comet reaches some 25 to 30 deg. above the southeastern horizon before the first light of dawn for Northern Hemisphere observers. For those south of the equator, the comet will be about 20 to 25 deg. above the eastern horizon. Here are positions for McNaught-Hartley as it moves through Libra for 0 hours Universal Time in 2000.0 coordinates: Date R.A. Dec. Dec 30 14h 31m -18.7 deg. Jan 1 14 56 -12.8 Jan 3 15 02 -11.3 Jan 5 15 08 -09.8 For more about the comet, see the Special Sky Events page at http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0101skyevents.html . QUADRANTID METEORS You won't need optical aid to see the peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower -- but you'll still have to wake up before dawn. The peak is expected on January 3rd at about 12 hours Universal Time, which corresponds in North America to 6 a.m. Central Standard Time and 4 a.m. Pacific. This year the first-quarter Moon will pose no interference, for it sets shortly after midnight and leaves the skies fully dark from then on. Toward dawn is when the shower radiant, halfway between the head of Draco and the end of the Big Dipper's handle, is highest in the sky. The "Quads" have a very sharp peak lasting only two hours or so. But if you're watching when it arrives, this can be one of the year's best meteor displays. Between midnight and dawn in good years, 40 or more of these moderately swift meteors may be seen per hour. Deviations of up to six hours from the predicted time of the peak have been noted in past years, so observers not just in North America but also in western Europe and Japan should be on the lookout for Quadrantids. DOUBLE SHADOWS ON JUPITER Here's another telescopic target: On Sunday evening, January 7th, observers in eastern North America and all of South America have ringside seats to watch the shadows of not one, but two, Galilean satellites crossing the disk of Jupiter simultaneously. Ganymede's shadow will first appear on Jupiter's east limb at 9:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Io's shadow joins it at 10:13 p.m. For the next hour and a half, both shadows should remain visible in small telescopes as dark spots on the planet's disk. Ganymede's is the first to leave, at 11:44 p.m., followed by Io's at 12:24 a.m. EST (on January 8th). For an illustration of how Jupiter should appear, see the January Special Sky Events Page at http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0101skyevents.html . One week later, a repeat of this event occurs for observers in western North America. On Sunday evening, January 14th, Io's shadow begins its march at 9:08 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, to be joined by that of Ganymede at 10:36 p.m. Then at 11:23 p.m. Io's shadow leaves the disk, followed by Ganymede's at 12:46 a.m. PST (on the 15th). THIS WEEK'S "SKY AT A GLANCE" Some daily events in the changing sky, by the editors of Sky & Telescope. DEC. 31 -- SUNDAY * Midnight tonight marks the beginning of the 21st Century and the Third Millennium. After the midnight New Year's celebrations, step outside into the quiet dark and look up. Sirius will be shining at its highest in the south. Orion will be to its upper right, and Procyon will be a similar distance to Sirius's upper left. One thousand years from now, this sky scene will be very much the same -- except that due to precession, the stars will be nearly an hour east of their present midnight positions. Tonight Jupiter and Saturn shine in Taurus high in the west-southwest, but on January 1, 3001, their midnight places will be taken by the full Moon shining near Aldebaran and by bright Mars blazing close to the Pleiades. That much is predictable. But turn your gaze down, and prediction becomes impossible. What wonders, or desolation, will cover the landscape under the silent stars? * Jupiter's Great Red Spot should cross Jupiter's central meridian (the imaginary line down the center of the planet's disk from pole to pole) around 9:38 p.m. EST. The "red" spot is very pale orange-tan. It should be visible in a good 4- or 6-inch telescope if the atmospheric seeing is sharp and steady. For a list of all predicted Red Spot transit times, see http://www.skypub.com/sights/moonplanets/redspot.html . JAN. 1 -- MONDAY * As soon as darkness falls, look rather low in the northwest for Vega, the "Summer Star" lingering all the way into the following year. * Saturn's largest moon, Titan, appears three or four ring-lengths east of Saturn this evening and tomorrow evening. A 3-inch telescope should show it. JAN. 2 -- TUESDAY * First-quarter Moon (exact at 5:31 p.m. Eastern Standard Time). * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 11:16 p.m. EST. * Watch for the Quadrantid meteors just before dawn in central and western North America. JAN. 3 -- WEDNESDAY * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 7:08 p.m. EST. JAN. 4 -- THURSDAY * Latest sunrise of the year (if you live near 40 degrees north latitude). * The Earth is at perihelion, its closest to the Sun for the year (3.4 percent closer than at aphelion in July). * Jupiter's moon Europa crosses Jupiter's face from 9:11 to 11:45 p.m. EST, followed by its tiny black shadow from 10:57 p.m. to 1:33 a.m. Friday morning EST. JAN. 5 -- FRIDAY * The Moon shines close to Saturn this evening, with brighter Jupiter to their left. JAN. 6 -- SATURDAY * The Moon shines near Aldebaran this evening, with Jupiter and Saturn to their upper right. * Jupiter's moon Europa reappears from eclipse out of Jupiter's shadow around 7:46 p.m. EST. A small telescope will show it gradually emerging into view a little east of the planet. ============================ THIS WEEK'S PLANET ROUNDUP ============================ MERCURY is hidden in the glare of the Sun. VENUS shines very brilliantly (magnitude -4.3) in the southwestern sky during and after dusk. MARS (magnitude +1.4, at the Virgo-Libra border) glows yellow-orange high in the south-southeast before dawn. To its upper right shines Spica, slightly brighter at magnitude +1.0. JUPITER and SATURN (magnitudes -2.6 and -0.3, respectively) shine brightly high in the southeast to south during evening. Jupiter is the brightest one. Yellowish Saturn appears 8 degrees (less than a fist-width at arm's length) to Jupiter's right. They're in the constellation Taurus; above Jupiter is the Pleiades star cluster, and farther to Jupiter's lower left sparkles orange Aldebaran. URANUS and NEPTUNE are getting very low in the southwest just after dark. PLUTO is hidden in the glow of sunrise. (All descriptions that relate to the horizon or zenith -- including the words up, down, right, and left -- are written for the world's midnorthern latitudes. Descriptions that also depend on longitude are for North America. Eastern Standard Time, EST, equals Universal Time [GMT] minus 5 hours.) More celestial events, sky maps, and news of the world's astronomy research appear each month in SKY & TELESCOPE, the essential magazine of astronomy. See our enormous Web site and astronomy bookstore at http://www.skypub.com/ . Clear skies! SKY & TELESCOPE, 49 Bay State Rd., Cambridge, MA 02138 * 617-864-7360 =========================================================== Copyright 2000 Sky Publishing Corporation. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance stargazing calendar are provided as a service to the astronomical community by the editors of SKY & TELESCOPE magazine. Widespread electronic distribution is encouraged as long as these paragraphs are included. But the text of the bulletin and calendar may not be published in any other form without permission from Sky Publishing (contact permissions@skypub.com or phone 617-864-7360). Updates of astronomical news, including active links to related Internet resources, are available via SKY & TELESCOPE's site on the World Wide Web at http://www.skypub.com/. In cooperation with the American Association of Amateur Astronomers (http://www.corvus.com/), S&T's Weekly News Bulletin and Sky at a Glance are available via electronic mailing list. For a free subscription, send e-mail to join@astromax.com and put the word "join" on the first line of the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send e-mail to unjoin@astromax.com and put the word "unjoin" on the first line of the body of the message. If you should have any problems either subscribing to or unsubscribing from the list, send a message to list administrator John Wagoner at stargate@gte.net for assistance.

NEWSALERT: Sunday, December 31, 2000 @ 1653 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now CASSINI AND GALILEO SPACE PROBES DOUBLE-TEAM JUPITER ---------------------------------------------------- Joint observations of Jupiter by NASA's Cassini and Galileo spacecraft are providing an unprecedented look at the giant planet's atmosphere and magnetosphere, scientists said Saturday, just hours after Cassini made its closest approach to the solar system's largest planet. (Includes video and sounds of Jupiter clips!) http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/30flyby/ See our complete Cassini flyby coverage: http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/ YEAR'S END FOR GALILEO ---------------------- The end of the year 2000 finds the Galileo spacecraft starting to wrap up another encounter with the Jovian system. The spacecraft's camera takes the stage over the weekend, with observations to capture global color views of Io, plus images of Jupiter's main ring. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/31galileo/ FROM THE ARCHIVES IN 2000 ------------------------- GO FOR A RIDE WITH ROCKETCAMS! http://spaceflightnow.com/features/rocketcams/ TOP 10 IMAGES FROM COMMERCIAL EYE-IN-THE-SKY http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0009/25ikonos/ SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA UNDERGOES TUNE-UP http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/features/000414overhaul/

An Ailing Neil asked me to post this for him. With pleasure and get well, soon! From Earth to Mars in as little as two weeks Jan 3, 2001 BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL - Scientists at Ben-Gurion University have shown that an unusual nuclear fuel could send space vehicles from Earth to Mars in as little as two weeks. Spacecraft now take between eight and 10 months to make the same trip. The research shows a fairly rare nuclear material, americium-242m (Am-242m), when used as an extremely thin metallic film, is capable of sustaining nuclear fission. When the film is less than a thousandth of a millimetre thick, the high-energy, high-temperature products of fission can escape the fuel and be used for propulsion in space. Obtaining fission-fragments like this isn't possible with the better-known uranium-235 and plutonium-239 nuclear fuels: they require large fuel rods, which absorb fission products. Long-time interest Dr. Yigal Ronen, the author of the study, became interested in nuclear reactors for space vehicles 15 years ago at a conference. Speaker after speaker talked about the use of nuclear reactors for powering space missions - and stressed that the mass of any reactor would be the defining factor. It had to be light in order to be efficient. So Ronen decided to examine one aspect of reactor design - the nuclear fuel itself. That led him to Am-242m. By using this element, Ronen was able to cut the amount of fuel necessary to reach maximum power. To achieve the same result as uranium or plutonium requires only one per cent of the amount (mass) when Am-242m is used. But use of this fuel is still in the very early stages of development. "There are still many hurdles to overcome before americium-242m can be used in space," Ronen says. Producing large quantities of Am-242m requires several steps and is expensive. Design of the reactor, refuelling, heat removal and safety provisions also need to be examined. In spite of the hurdles, Ronen remains optimistic about the future of this fuel. "I am sure that americium-242m will eventually be implemented for space travel, as it is the only proven material whose fission products can be made available for high speed propulsion." The study was published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A (455: 442-451, 2000).

NEWSALERT: Thursday, January 4, 2001 @ 0610 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now HUBBLE: X MARKS THE SPOT OF STAR FORMATION GLOW ----------------------------------------------- The saying "X" marks the spot holds true in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image where Hubble-X marks the location of a dramatic burst of star formation, very much like the Orion Nebula in our Milky Way galaxy, but on a vastly greater scale. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/04hubblex/ MASSIVE GAS CLOUD FOUND NEAR YOUNG GALAXY ----------------------------------------- A massive gas cloud with the raw materials to form 100 billion stars could reshape theories of galaxy formation. Astronomers say a distant young galaxy harbors a unexpectedly massive cloud of hydrogen gas that may fuel a burst of star formation. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/04galaxygas/ SHUTTLE ATLANTIS ARRIVES ON SEASIDE LAUNCH PAD ---------------------------------------------- After a day's delay because of computer troubles, space shuttle Atlantis made a 3.5-mile, six-hour crawl to launch pad 39A Wednesday at Kennedy Space Center. Atlantis is being prepared for blastoff later this month to carry the $1.4 billion U.S. Destiny laboratory module to the international space station. http://spaceflightnow.com/station/stage5a/010103rollout/ SHUTTLE ROLLOUT PANORAMA ------------------------ As space shuttle Atlantis rolled atop Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A, Spaceflight Now was there to capture this 360-degree panorama. http://spaceflightnow.com/station/stage5a/010103rollout/rollout_qtvr.html EXPEDITION ONE CREW TROUBLESHOOTS BATTERY PROBLEM ------------------------------------------------- The international space station's Expedition One crew moved into its tenth week in orbit Wednesday aboard the orbiting outpost. The only technical issue being addressed by Russian flight controllers involves a minor problem with battery three in the Zvezda service module. http://spaceflightnow.com/station/status.html BOEING WINS POTENTIAL $1.3B FOR SIX MILITARY SATELLITES ------------------------------------------------------- Boeing has been picked to led the charge in developing the U.S. military's next-generation Wideband Gapfiller Satellite communications network, which could lead to the company building as many as six spacecraft for the system. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/04gapfiller/ ARIANESPACE SETS MONDAY LAUNCH DATE FOR STALLED ARIANE 4 -------------------------------------------------------- Activity at Guiana Space Center's Ariane 4 launch pad is once again bustling as Arianespace has announced that Flight 137 is back on track for blastoff next week after a month-long delay caused by the rocket's Turkish communications satellite cargo. http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v137/status.html

NEWSALERT: Friday, January 5, 2001 @ 0617 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now PLANETS ORBITING OTHER STARS COULD BE MORE PLENTIFUL ---------------------------------------------------- The number of stars with extrasolar planets may be much larger than previously thought, scientists studying several nearby stars concluded this week. Research shows that clouds of molecular hydrogen gas, the raw material for gas giant planets like Jupiter, may last millions of years longer than once believed, making it much easier for such planets to form. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/05extrasolar/ NASA MULLS OPTIONS FOR FUTURE LOW-COST EXPLORER ----------------------------------------------- On beat with its "faster, better, cheaper" rhythm, NASA on Thursday announced the selection of three proposed low-cost missions for further in-depth study, including one that seeks to find habitable planets outside our solar system. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/05discovery/ COMPLETELY DARK GALAXIES ------------------------ The universe could be harboring numerous galaxies that have no stars at all and are made entirely of dark matter. Astronomers may ultimately discover that completely dark galaxies outnumber the familiar kind populated by shining stars and gas, perhaps by as many as 100 to 1. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/05dark/ CASSINI PROBE KEEPS ITS SCIENTIFIC EYE ON JUPITER ----------------------------------------------- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has continued collecting new scientific information from Jupiter's environs every day since making its closest approach to the giant planet on Saturday, and is scheduled to keep studying the Jupiter system for another three months while proceeding on toward Saturn. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/05cassini/ See our complete Cassini special report: http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/ HUBBLE: X MARKS THE SPOT OF STAR FORMATION GLOW ----------------------------------------------- The saying "X" marks the spot holds true in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image where Hubble-X marks the location of a dramatic burst of star formation, very much like the Orion Nebula in our Milky Way galaxy, but on a vastly greater scale. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/04hubblex/ SHUTTLE ROLLOUT PANORAMA ------------------------ As space shuttle Atlantis rolled atop Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A, Spaceflight Now was there to capture this 360-degree panorama. http://spaceflightnow.com/station/stage5a/010103rollout/rollout_qtvr.html

10 new moons found around Jupiter / 2 rocket launches today NEWSALERT: Monday, January 8, 2001 @ 0552 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now 10 ADDITIONAL MOONS DISCOVERED AROUND JUPITER --------------------------------------------- An unprecedented surge in planetary moon discoveries continues as astronomers announced Friday the discovery of 10 more moons orbiting Jupiter. The ten natural satellites were first spotted in late November and early December by a group of astronomers at the University of Hawaii. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/08jovianmoons/ ARIANESPACE ARIANE 4 TO ROCKET INTO 2001 ---------------------------------------- If an Ariane 4 rocket launches on time Monday it will have the distinction as planet Earth's first space flight of 2001. If the European launcher can deliver its Turkish communications satellite cargo into the correct orbit it will mark the workhorse Ariane 4's 60th consecutive success. We will have complete live coverage! http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v137/status.html SEA LAUNCH TO LOFT FIRST XM RADIO SATELLITE TODAY ------------------------------------------------- The three-stage Ukrainian-Russian Zenit 3SL rocket was rolled from its hangar and erected atop the Odyssey launch platform Sunday as the countdown ticked away for Monday's scheduled 2235 GMT (5:35 p.m. EST) blastoff. We will have live coverage of the launch as the first XM Satellite Radio craft is boosted to orbit! http://spaceflightnow.com/sealaunch/xm1/status.html Watch an animation clip of XM 1 satellite: http://spaceflightnow.com/sealaunch/xm1/010107anim_qt.html NASA'S CORE POLICY OVER LAST DECADE GETS CLOSER LOOK ---------------------------------------------------- A team of NASA officials not long ago completed a thorough review of the space agency's "faster, better, cheaper" policy. The 83-page report highlights recommendations for where these policies and programs should be headed and how to improve them enough to get them there. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/08nasareview/ SPACE SHUTTLES THAT REPAIR TECHNICAL GLITCHES ON THE FLY -------------------------------------------------------- Ever stop and think about the millions of dollars spent on fancy space equipment that breaks down? If you are millions of miles away orbiting the Earth, there's no repairman available to fix the problem. The answer: machines that are smart enough to learn from experience, detect problems and fix themselves. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/07fixitshuttle/ RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL SIGNS OFF ON MIR DEORBITING ------------------------------------------------------- Space station Mir's destruction upon burning up during re-entry seems even more certain with the announcement by a Russian Space Agency spokesperson that the Russian Prime Minister has signed an order mandating the deorbiting late next month. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/07mirok/ AUSTRALIAN SALT LAKE HELPS TEST NASA 'SKY EYE' ---------------------------------------------- A team of scientists has just spent a week in a huge barren salt lake in Australia's interior helping to test a new NASA satellite -- the Earth Observing 1 technology demonstrator. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/07eo1test/ SEASONS GREETINGS FROM THE MARTIAN NORTH POLE! ---------------------------------------------- As many children across the U.S. and elsewhere anticipating an annual visit from a generous and jolly red-suited soul from the Earth's North Pole, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor was busy acquiring new views of the region around the Martian North Pole. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/06marscaps/

Sea Launch aborts liftoff / Cat's Eye nebula revealed NEWSALERT: Tuesday, January 9, 2001 @ 0728 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now SEA LAUNCH ABORTS LIFTOFF IN FINAL SECONDS OF COUNTDOWN ------------------------------------------------------- A last-moment concern with the XM 1 radio broadcasting satellite cargo led to a frantic halt to the countdown of Sea Launch's Zenit 3SL rocket on Monday with clocks stopping 11 seconds before blastoff from the Odyssey platform in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. http://spaceflightnow.com/sealaunch/xm1/status.html Watch video clip of countdown abort: http://spaceflightnow.com/sealaunch/xm1/010108abort_qt.html CHANDRA REVEALS THE X-RAY GLINT IN THE CAT'S EYE NEBULA ------------------------------------------------------- Scientists have discovered a glowing bubble of hot gas and an unexpected X-ray bright central star within the planetary nebula known as the Cat's Eye using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The new results provide insight into the ways that stars like our Sun end their lives. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/09chandraeye/ ARIANESPACE ARIANE 4 ROCKET LAUNCH DELAYED 24 HOURS --------------------------------------------------- Gusty high altitude winds above the jungle launch site in Kourou, French Guiana forced Arianespace to scrub Monday's planned liftoff of an Ariane 4 rocket carrying the Eurasiasat 1 telecommunications satellite. Officials are hoping for improved conditions Tuesday evening. http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v137/status.html ASTRONOMERS MAP OUT LARGEST STRUCTURE IN DISTANT UNIVERSE --------------------------------------------------------- By reading the light from the fiery heart of unimaginably remote galaxies, astronomers have discovered evidence for an immense concentration of galaxies over 6.5 billion light years away in the largest known group of quasars, possibly the largest structure anywhere in the observable universe. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/09lgstructure/ RARE SPHERICAL NEBULA HELPS MEASURE STARS' COMPOSITION ------------------------------------------------------ The simple spherical geometry of the beautiful planetary nebula Abell 39 will help astronomers identify the source of very serious errors in measuring the chemical composition of dying stars. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/09rarenebula/ EVIDENCE PRESENTED FOR NEW SUPERNOVA EXPLOSION MODEL ---------------------------------------------------- New research, based on observations of a brilliant supernova, is challenging existing models of how one type of the powerful explosions take place in the Universe. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/09supernova/

No Wonder I could not find it - had it posted in Archaeology!!! =========================================================== SKY & TELESCOPE'S NEWS BULLETIN - JANUARY 5, 2001 =========================================================== For images and Web links for these items, visit http://www.skypub.com =========================================================== Axel Mellinger's composite image of the entire Milky Way was so stunning that we made it into a poster. Now, not only is there a 2nd Edition of his quick-selling panorama, Mellinger has imaged the polar regions as well to create a spectacular all-sky view. The 24-by-36- inch "Celestial Sphere" poster consists of 51 wide-angle exposures stitched together into a seamless "real" map of the entire sky. The poster comes with a key chart identifying major constellations and stars. To order either of Mellinger's posters, visit Sky Publishing's online store at http://store.skypub.com/ or call 800-253-0245. =========================================================== ASTRONOMERS FLOCK TO SAN DIEGO The 197th meeting of the American Astronomical Society will be held January 7-11 in San Diego, California. Visit Sky & Telescope's Web site (http://www.skypub.com/) for late-breaking news reports filed by S&T's on-the-scene editors Rick Fienberg and Alan MacRobert. CELEBRATING CERES AT 200 On the first night of 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi saw a "star" that didn't belong in the field of his little refractor mounted atop the royal palace at Palermo, Italy. "I have announced this star as a comet," he wrote later that January, "but . . . it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better." He had, in fact, spotted the first minor planet, which was soon named Ceres, after the Roman goddess of the harvest and the patron goddess of Sicily. Exactly 200 years later, an eclectic mix of astronomers, artisans, philosophers, and historians gathered in Palermo to celebrate the Theatine monk's discovery. In a lecture prior to the group's party to mark the beginning of the new, true millennium, Giorgia Fodera-Serio pointed out that Piazzi's then state-of-the-art telescope has now been completely restored. All its parts are original, except for the eyepiece, and it has been remounted atop the former palace. At the time, Piazzi's discovery seemed to be the long-sought confirmation of what today is known as the Titius-Bode "law." First publicized in 1772, it neatly described the orbital spacings of the five planets then known. But there was one glaring glitch: the law predicted a planet between Mars and Jupiter, but none was known. Ceres seemed to fulfill the law's prophesy. After the newcomer passed through the Sun's glare and emerged once again into the night sky, it was recovered by Franz von Zach the night preceding the first anniversary of its discovery. Three months later, Heinrich Olbers discovered the second minor planet, Pallas. That posed a serious problem for the Titius-Bode law -- now there were two planets where only one should be. But by then Piazzi and others had already begun to doubt that Ceres measured up to full-planet status. Even to these early observers, it was evident that Ceres was too small to qualify. Today we know that this largest minor planet is only about 930 kilometers in diameter, a quarter the size of the Moon. And we know that Ceres is accompanied by thousands of similar bodies that inhabit the so-called asteroid belt. PATRICK MOORE TO BE KNIGHTED Patrick Moore has been England's unofficial prince of astronomy for more than four decades. At the end of last month, Buckingham Palace announced that he will receive the country's highest royal recognition when Queen Elizabeth II will bestow knighthood upon him for "services to the popularisation of science and to broadcasting." Moore, 77, has written and starred in the BBC television series "The Sky at Night" for 44 years, making it the world's longest-running television show with a single host. Americans and the rest of the world are probably more familiar with some of his approximately 100 books and numerous magazine articles. He has been an active amateur astronomer since even before joining the British Astronomical Association at age 11. Unfortunately, his observing may have come to an abrupt end. Moore explains that a deterioration of his spine has left him unable to use his telescope or to write. "Writing is impossible, and even typing is very difficult and slow," he told Sky & Telescope. "Unfortunately there seems little to be done about it, and I have to accept that my really active life has come to a sudden and premature end." Nevertheless, Moore hopes to be able to continue with "The Sky at Night" for a while longer. For additional details about Moore's astronomical career, see David Levy's profile in the May 1997 issue of Sky & Telescope (page 106). CASSINI'S NEW GROOVE The Cassini spacecraft and its attached Huygens probe swept past Jupiter on December 30th at a distance of 9.7 million kilometers, close enough to boost the combined craft's velocity and redirect it toward an encounter with Saturn in 3-1/2 years. The end-of-the-year passage also gave project scientists a chance to flex their instruments' muscles with studies of the planet, some of its moons, and its magnetosphere. Cassini had to stop taking measurements on December 17th due to a mechanical glitch, but engineers fixed the problem within five days and data-taking resumed on the 28th. Many of the investigations involved sampling the solar-wind upstream of the immense Jovian magnetosphere. Speaking to reporters hours after the spacecraft came closet to Jupiter, investigator William Kurth (University of Iowa) noted that Cassini had crossed the magnetosphere's bow shock (where the solar wind is abruptly decelerated) about a day earlier than anticipated. This meant that the planet's magnetic bubble extended sunward about twice as far as had been predicted based on Voyager data from 1979. Apparently, an unusually slow and weak solar wind allowed the Jovian magnetosphere to expand upstream. Dramatic new images and animations show that the giant planet's cloud features are as turbulent as ever. "The camera has performed beyond our wildest imaginings," beamed imaging-team leader Carolyn Porco (University of Arizona). A time-lapse movie of the planet's faint ring revealed no new structure appears in the ring itself, though the inner moonlets Metis and Adrastea (thought to provide much of the ring's particles) could be seen racing around in their orbits. Team member Andrew Ingersoll (Caltech) described the tortured lives of small cloud eddies within the Jovian atmosphere -- one of the scientific objectives that the Galileo spacecraft could not fully accomplish due to the limited amount of data that it can relay to Earth through its damaged antenna. Otherwise Galileo continues to function well after five years in orbit around Jupiter. While Cassini examined the planet from afar, Galileo made a series of complementary observations from about 500,000 km away. For example, both spacecraft examined Ganymede and Io for auroral activity when each moon was in Jupiter's shadow. On December 28th Galileo skirted 2,337 km from Ganymede, a close pass that should improve knowledge of the big moon's surface features, magnetic field, and interior structure. A KUIPER BELT GIANT Fame is fleeting in the rapidly growing realm of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs). Last March astronomers spotted 2000 EB173, which has an estimated diameter of 600 kilometers. But that object quickly lost its distinction as the year's largest discovery. On November 28th Robert S. McMillan and later Jeffrey A. Larsen found a 20th-magnitude blip designated 2000 WR106. Initially its size was uncertain, and for a while observers believed it might exceed the diameter of 1 Ceres, the largest asteroid (933 km), or even Pluto's moon, Charon (1,250 km). Gauging the diameter of 2000 WR106 accurately required firmer estimates for its distance and the reflectivity of its surface. Fortunately, German amateur astronomers Andre Knoefel and Reiner Stoss identified the object on photographic plates taken in 1955 with the 48-inch Schmidt telescope on Palomar Mountain. Those positions proved crucial in clinching an orbit with a mean distance of 43 astronomical units (6.4 billion km) from the Sun, an eccentricity of 0.06, and an inclination of 17 deg. Clues to the diameter of 2000 WR106 came on December 30th, when David C. Jewitt and Herve Aussel (University of Hawaii) used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea to measure its brightness at a wavelength of 350 microns. Combining this data with the object's visual and near-infrared brightness yielded a very dark albedo of 7 percent (so its surface is unlikely to have a widespread coating of frost). The diameter lies somewhere between 750 and 1,000 km -- most likely near 900. Thus 2000 WR106 does indeed challenge Ceres for the title of "largest known minor planet." COMET MCNAUGHT-HARTLEY CLIMBS HIGHER Comet McNaught-Hartley (C/1999 T1) continues to climb in the morning sky. The object, a hair brighter than 8th magnitude according to observers, continues moving through Libra this coming week. You can spot it some 30 to 35 deg. above the southeastern horizon before the first light of dawn for Northern Hemisphere observers; about a dozen degrees to the upper left of Mars. For those south of the equator, the comet will be about 20 to 30 deg. above the eastern horizon, to the lower left of Mars. Here are positions for McNaught-Hartley for 0 hours Universal Time in 2000.0 coordinates: Date R.A. Dec. Jan 6 15h 10m -9.1 deg. Jan 8 15 16 -7.5 Jan 10 15 22 -5.9 Jan 12 15 27 -4.2 For more about the comet, see the Special Sky Events page at http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0101skyevents.html . DOUBLE SHADOWS ON JUPITER On Sunday evening, January 7th, observers in eastern North America and all of South America have ringside seats to watch the shadows of not one, but two, Galilean satellites crossing the disk of Jupiter simultaneously. Ganymede's shadow will first appear on Jupiter's east limb at 9:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Io's shadow joins it at 10:13 p.m. For the next hour and a half, both shadows should remain visible in small telescopes as dark spots on the planet's disk. Ganymede's is the first to leave, at 11:44 p.m., followed by Io's at 12:24 a.m. EST (on January 8th). For an illustration of how Jupiter should appear, see the January Special Sky Events Page at http://www.skypub.com/sights/skyevents/0101skyevents.html . One week later, a repeat of this event occurs for observers in western North America. On Sunday evening, January 14th, Io's shadow begins its march at 9:08 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, to be joined by that of Ganymede at 10:36 p.m. Then at 11:23 p.m. Io's shadow leaves the disk, followed by Ganymede's at 12:46 a.m. PST (on the 15th). THIS WEEK'S "SKY AT A GLANCE" Some daily events in the changing sky, by the editors of Sky & Telescope. JAN. 7 -- SUNDAY * Tonight the dark limb of the waxing gibbous Moon will occult (cover) the 3.0-magnitude star Zeta Tauri for observers all across North America. You can watch the star wink out using a small telescope or even binoculars. A timetable is in the January Sky & Telescope, page 118. * Double shadow transit on Jupiter: The tiny black shadows of Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Io are both on the planet's face from 10:13 to 11:44 p.m. EST. A good 3-inch telescope should be all you need -- if the atmospheric seeing is good. * Meanwhile, Jupiter's Great Red Spot should cross Jupiter's central meridian (the imaginary line down the center of the planet's disk from pole to pole) around 10:24 p.m. EST. The "red" spot is very pale orange-tan. It should be visible in a good 4- or 6-inch telescope if the atmospheric seeing is sharp and steady. For a list of all predicted Red Spot transit times, see http://www.skypub.com/sights/moonplanets/redspot.html . * Dawn begins at its latest for the year (if you live near 40 degrees north latitude). JAN. 8 -- MONDAY * This evening Saturn's brightest moon, 8.5-magnitude Titan, appears close to a 7th-magnitude star. They're closest, 21 arcseconds apart, around 6 p.m. EST. A 3-inch telescope should show them; look three ring-lengths west-northwest of the planet. JAN. 9 -- TUESDAY * Full Moon (exact at 3:24 p.m. EST). During the evening, look for Pollux and Castor to the Moon's upper left and brighter Procyon shining farther to the Moon's lower right. * TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE FOR ASIA, AFRICA, AND EUROPE. Partial eclipse begins at 18:42 Universal Time (GMT) January 9th, total eclipse begins at 19:50 UT; total ends at 20:52 UT, partial ends at 21:59 UT. For full details see the January Sky & Telescope, page 124, or http://www.skypub.com/sights/eclipses/lunar/0101totallunar.html . * Jupiter's Red Spot should transit around 12:03 a.m. EST Wednesday morning. JAN. 10 -- WEDNESDAY * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 7:54 p.m. EST. JAN. 11 -- THURSDAY * Look for Regulus below the Moon after they rise in mid- to late evening. JAN. 12 -- FRIDAY * Jupiter's Red Spot transits around 9:33 p.m. EST. JAN. 13 -- SATURDAY * Jupiter's moon Europa emerges from eclipse out of Jupiter's shadow around 10:24 p.m. EST. A small telescope will show it swelling into brilliance during the course of a minute or two, a little east of the planet. ============================ THIS WEEK'S PLANET ROUNDUP ============================ MERCURY is buried deep in the glow of sunset. Late this week, try looking for it with binoculars just above the west-southwest horizon (far to the lower right of Venus) about 20 to 30 minutes after sunset. Next week Mercury will get higher. VENUS is the brilliant object (magnitude -4.4) shining in the southwest during and after dusk. MARS (magnitude +1.2, at the Virgo-Libra border) glows yellow-orange in the south-southeast before dawn. To its right or upper right is blue-white Spica, similarly bright. JUPITER and SATURN (magnitudes -2.6 and -0.3, respectively) shine brightly high in the southeast to south during early to mid-evening. Jupiter is the brightest. Yellowish Saturn appears 7 or 8 degrees (about four fingers' widths at arm's length) to Jupiter's right. They're in the constellation Taurus; above Jupiter is the Pleiades star cluster, and farther to Jupiter's lower left sparkles orange Aldebaran. The whole pattern rotates clockwise and shifts toward the west as evening grows late. URANUS and NEPTUNE are hidden in the glow of sunset. PLUTO (magnitude 14; invisible without a large telescope) is very low in the east-southeast before dawn. (All descriptions that relate to the horizon or zenith -- including the words up, down, right, and left -- are written for the world's midnorthern latitudes. Descriptions that also depend on longitude are for North America. Eastern Standard Time, EST, equals Universal Time [GMT] minus 5 hours.)

Britons Get Front Row Seats for Lunar Eclipse LONDON (Reuters) - Britons had front row seats on Tuesday night for a three-hour show billed as the most colorful lunar eclipse for a decade. Beginning at around 1:40 p.m. EST, the earth's shadow slowly moved over the surface of the moon until finally eclipsing it at about 2:50 EST. Totality -- when the moon is completely covered by the earth's shadow -- saw the moon turn orange as the light from the sun was bent and filtered by the earth's atmosphere. Astronomers said the eclipse was particularly spectacular because it is almost a decade since the last big volcanic eruption -- that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. The debris thrown up by volcanic eruptions reduces the amount of light transmitted from the sun to the moon during a lunar eclipse. Tuesday's show was visible from all parts of Britain, as well as Europe, Africa and Asia. The only restricting factor for some was the weather, with some areas covered by cloud. The last total eclipse of the moon visible from Britain, in January 2000, was obscured by cloud across much of the country. The moon "turning to blood" was once seen as a sign that disaster would strike or that the gods were angry. In some places it still fills people with fear. An estimated 1,500 white witches are planning to gather in Britain, Sweden, Iceland, France, Canada and Austria during the eclipse to ward off any doom it may bring, the BBC reported.

NEWSALERT: Wednesday, January 10, 2001 @ 0530 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now CHINESE CAPSULE LAUNCHED ON SECOND UNMANNED TEST ------------------------------------------------ China took another step towards manned space travel Tuesday by launching its second prototype capsule on a demonstration flight. The unmanned Shenzhou 2 spacecraft, with several animals aboard, was successfully launched into the planned orbit around Earth by a Long March rocket on a several-day excursion. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/09china/ BIZARRE NEW PLANETS PUZZLE ASTRONOMERS -------------------------------------- Astronomers Tuesday announced the discovery of a pair of new and highly unusual planetary systems that challenge their views on the structure of solar systems and even the definition of a planet. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/10newplanets/ ENGINE REPLACEMENT DELAYS SEA LAUNCH TO FEB. 28 ----------------------------------------------- Sea Launch officials Tuesday decided the first stage engine on the Zenit 3SL rocket needs to be replaced because its pre-ignition sequence was started during Monday's aborted countdown. The job will require the command ship and launching platform return to port, delaying the mission until February 28. http://spaceflightnow.com/sealaunch/xm1/status.html 'PIPELINE' FUNNELS MATTER BETWEEN COLLIDING GALAXIES ---------------------------------------------------- This visible-light picture, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveals an intergalactic "pipeline" of material flowing between two battered galaxies that bumped into each other about 100 million years ago. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/09pipeline/ WINDS POSTPONE ARIANE 4 ROCKET LAUNCH YET AGAIN ----------------------------------------------- Continued unacceptable winds above the jungle launch site in Kourou, French Guiana forced Arianespace to forego making an attempt Tuesday night to fly the Ariane 4 rocket with the Eurasiasat 1 satellite. Launch has been reset for tonight and we will have live coverage! http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v137/status.html OVER 150 RAPIDLY MOVING STARS FOUND IN MILKY WAY ------------------------------------------------ Astronomers have discovered 154 rapidly moving stars towards the center of our galaxy and our brightest neighboring galaxy. The results are of special interest because this is the first time scientists have been able to discover such objects in front of the millions of stars seen at the Galactic center and the Large Magellanic Cloud. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/10stars150/ BOEING BEGINS BUILDING NAVY COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE ---------------------------------------------------- Boeing has received the final go-ahead to manufacture an eleventh satellite for the U.S. Navy's UHF Follow-On communications satellite constellation, keeping the network working well into this decade to relay spy satellite photos, intelligence reports and strike orders to U.S. troops around the world. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/10uhf11/

Moon Hoax Spurs Crusade Against Bad Astronomy SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The myth about equinox eggs got him started, misinformation about meteors bugged him, but when he learned that some people think the Apollo Moon landings never happened, Philip Plait knew the time had come for his crusade against bad astronomy. So what began as a frustrated astronomy graduate student's online fuming has evolved into a newspaper column, a book contract and a Web site that gets an average of 15,000 hits a week: http:/www.badastronomy.com. No one is spared on the site: Plait, who holds a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Virginia and worked with the Hubble Space Telescope, takes aim at movies, television, the news media and the Internet when they trample on what he considers to be the obvious truths about space science. Take, for example, the notion that humans never walked on the Moon, despite copious evidence to the contrary. "People believe in the weirdest stuff, but they don't believe the most flaming obvious thing that's right in front of their face and I get e-mail about this," Plait said in an interview at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego. He blames much of it on the movie "Capricorn One," a science fiction offering in which a planned human mission to Mars is faked. "It's a good flick, but it legitimized a lot of these people who claimed we never went to the Moon," Plait said. "There weren't that many people, but with the Web, you can spread disinformation instantly. People are just willing to grab onto this stuff." WHERE ARE THE STARS IN MOON PHOTOS? One common argument used by the anti-Apollo folks is that in photographs of astronauts on the lunar surface, no stars can be seen in the dark sky, therefore the pictures must have been taken on Earth somewhere. Plait literally gagged as he recounted this, and countered with what to him was the obvious fact: there are no stars in the pictures from the moon because the Moon itself is being blasted with sunlight and is enormously bright, so bright that people on Earth can sometimes read by the light of the full Moon. "When they're taking a picture of this brightly lit astronaut on a brightly lit landscape, it's just like taking a picture in daytime here on the earth," he said. "No stars have a prayer of getting through that." Rather that debunking this idea on his Web site, Plait has a section referring visitors to other sites of "debunkers" and "conspiracy theories." But he plans a chapter in an upcoming book to be called "Bad Astronomy" on this question. There will also be a chapter on those who calculate the birth of the universe using the Bible, estimating its age in the thousands of years, instead of the billions of years that astronomers have long maintained. "Astronomy is one of the most accessible sciences," he said. "Everybody wonders about it and it does tap into the fundamental questions of humanity -- why are we here, what's our place in the universe, does the universe have an end, how did it start -- these aren't little questions, whole religions, trillion-dollar-a-year industries are based on these questions. "But it means that there's an open door into people's heads. If you can use that pathway to get to people, it's a good way to do it, for ill or for good," Plait said. Beginning in his student days in 1993 and 1994 with a personal Web site as his platform, Plait expressed irritation at a commonly held belief: that eggs can only be stood on end at the exact moment of vernal equinox. That, said Plait, is just plain nonsense. And he said so on his site, eventually featuring a picture of a gaggle of eggs at attention, taken on Oct. 25 -- as he said, about as far from the vernal equinox as possible. He did not hit on the idea of creating a Web site about bad astronomy until 1998, several months before a Leonid meteor shower. It turned out to be good timing: there was plenty of media grist for his mill in that event. Plait has not quit his day job: he currently works in California on public education programs for the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope. He also writes a column for the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

NEWSALERT: Sunday, January 7, 2001 @ 1728 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now SPACE SHUTTLES THAT REPAIR TECHNICAL GLITCHES ON THE FLY -------------------------------------------------------- Ever stop and think about the millions of dollars spent on fancy space equipment that breaks down? If you are millions of miles away orbiting the Earth, there's no repairman available to fix the problem. The answer: machines that are smart enough to learn from experience, detect problems and fix themselves. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/07fixitshuttle/ RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL SIGNS OFF ON MIR DEORBITING ------------------------------------------------------- Space station Mir's destruction upon burning up during re-entry seems even more certain with the announcement by a Russian Space Agency spokesperson that the Russian Prime Minister has signed an order mandating the deorbiting late next month. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/07mirok/ AUSTRALIAN SALT LAKE HELPS TEST NASA 'SKY EYE' ---------------------------------------------- A team of scientists has just spent a week in a huge barren salt lake in Australia's interior helping to test a new NASA satellite -- the Earth Observing 1 technology demonstrator. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/07eo1test/

NEWSALERT: Thursday, January 11, 2001 @ 0654 GMT --------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest news from Astronomy Now and Spaceflight Now CHANDRA LINKS PULSAR TO SUPERNOVA OF 386 AD ------------------------------------------- New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggests that a known pulsar is the present-day counterpart to a supernova that exploded in 386 AD, a stellar explosion witnessed by Chinese astronomers. If confirmed, this will be only the second known pulsar to be clearly associated with a historic event. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/11chandra/ EXTREME WARP FOUND IN ANDROMEDA'S STELLAR DISK ---------------------------------------------- Astronomers have obtained new evidence of an extreme warp in the stellar disk of the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest galactic neighbor. Possible causes of the warp include interactions between Andromeda and its smaller satellite galaxies. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/11warpdisk/ ARIANESPACE BEGINS 2001 WITH LAUNCH FOR TURKEY ---------------------------------------------- A telecommunications satellite that will bridge 150 million Turkish-speaking people of Europe and Asia was launched into orbit Wednesday by an Arianespace Ariane 4 rocket, marking the European booster's 60th straight success. http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v137/ http://spaceflightnow.com/ariane/v137/status.html ARIANESPACE POSTS $185 MILLION LOSS FOR 2000 -------------------------------------------- Arianespace reports it lost money last year, the first time the European launch services firm's annual earnings have wound up in the red during its 20-year history. But officials say they are optimistic that mark will not be repeated in 2001 with plans to reduce operating costs. http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/11ariane2000/ AIR FORCE DELAYS LAUNCH OF WEATHER SATELLITE FOR REPAIRS -------------------------------------------------------- Next week's launch of a U.S. military weather satellite aboard a Titan 2 rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base has been pushed back one day after technicians accidentally damaged a sun shield on the craft during pre-flight cleaning. http://spaceflightnow.com/titan/g9/ DATE SET FOR NEXT SPACE SHUTTLE LAUNCH -------------------------------------- NASA has established January 19 as the official launch date for space shuttle Atlantis' upcoming mission to deliver the $1.38 billion U.S. Destiny laboratory research module to the international space station. http://spaceflightnow.com/station/status.html

Space-Station Crew Awaits Next Shuttle Mission CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were busy preparing on Friday for the arrival later this month of a U.S. space shuttle carrying the station's newest element -- a U.S. laboratory named Destiny. The crew of American William Shepherd, the station commander, and Russians Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalyov, passed their 73rd day in space on Friday. NASA and the Russian Space Agency, senior partners in the $60 billion orbital construction project, said they plan to give the station crew more time to relax and prepare for the arrival of shuttle Atlantis than they had in December, when shuttle Endeavour's crew found them exhausted and sleep deprived. Atlantis is scheduled to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 19 with the $1.4 billion Destiny module in its payload bay. The weeks leading up to Endeavour's visit had been a mad scramble to bring life-support, communications and computers to life aboard the Russian Service Module after the trio docked their Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the station in November. That work meant the astronauts had to sacrifice sleep leading up to the shuttle's arrival, and left Shepherd complaining about "trying to fit 30 hours into 16-hour days." "We started the process of preparing the crew before Christmas" for Atlantis' arrival, Jeff Hanley, the U.S. space agency's lead flight director for the station, said at a NASA regular space station briefing held on Friday. But there was still plenty of work left for the astronauts, who will live aboard the station about 120 days before being replaced by the Expedition Two team of one Russian commander and two Americans. Like anyone expecting house guests, there are numerous repairs and plenty of cleaning up to do. This past week the crew fixed an air conditioner, replaced some electronics in the on-board power system and tested the Russian space suits that would be used for space walks. Radios on the space suits proved balky and Russian ground controllers are studying the problem, Hanley said. A more immediate problem is one of four latches that will be needed to secure the Destiny to an existing space-station module. While testing the latches earlier, NASA found that one of them would not close due to an obstruction from some ductwork. "These are latches that actually reach out and grab the incoming module, in this case the lab," Hanley said. NASA plans to have the astronauts enter that part of the station, which currently is closed off by a hatch, to work on the latch this week. Otherwise, the astronauts top job is to prepare the station for provisions and equipment that Atlantis will carry into orbit. "The main theme of next week is going to be packing, packing, packing," Hanley said. The space station is a joint project of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada. It is scheduled for completion in 2006 and will have as much pressurized space as a 747 jumbo jet.