Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Oct 1

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - October 1, 2004 * * *

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Welcome to S&T's Weekly News Bulletin. Images, the full text of stories
abridged here, and other enhancements are available on our Web site,
SkyandTelescope.com, at the URLs provided below. (If the links don't work, just
manually type the URLs into your Web browser.) Clear skies!

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TOUTATIS ENCOUNTERS EARTH -- AND MISSES (THIS TIME)

Moving at more than 11 kilometers per second (25,000 miles per hour), the
irregular, bowling-pin-shaped near-Earth asteroid 4179 Toutatis passed within
1.5 million kilometers of Earth (about 4 times the distance from Earth to the
Moon) at 13:40 Universal Time on September 29th. Twelve hours prior to this
close encounter, Gianluca Masi (Bellatrix Observatory, Ceccano, Italy), Franco
Mallia, and Roger Wilcox used the 14-inch SoTIE telescope at Las Campanas,
Chile, to capture 32 images of Toutatis during an 11-minute period. They
assembled the images into a time-lapse sequence that shows Toutatis moving
rapidly across a 15-arcminute-wide field of view. The asteroid is not expected
to pass this close to Earth again until 2562.

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1360_1.asp

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ROVER TRACKS FROM SPACE

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? The Mars Global Surveyor, now
within weeks of conducting its 25,000th mapping orbit around the Red Planet, is
taking images with higher resolution than ever before. Using a new technique,
MGS operators modify the rotation rate of the spacecraft such that it matches
the ground speed under the camera. The results are remarkable....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1359_1.asp

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MARS METHANE BOOSTS CHANCES FOR LIFE

Last week the European Space Agency reported new results from Mars Express that
bolster the hope that small colonies of microbes may be eking out an existence
under the Martian surface today. Atmospheric data from the orbiter's Planetary
Fourier Spectrometer show that water vapor and methane show up together above
three equatorial regions that overlie subsurface ice -- suggesting a common
underground origin. Methane is considered a possible biomarker. It breaks down
rapidly in Mars's atmosphere, so its presence is intriguing. Some source --
biological or geological -- must constantly replenish the gas....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1358_1.asp

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STAR PARTYING IN THE ALPS

One of the highest annual star parties in Europe drew 250 people on the weekend
of September 17-19 to the grassy mountain slopes above the small town of
Greifenburg in southern Austria. Known as the Internationales Teleskoptreffen,
or ITT (International Telescope Meeting), the event took place in and around
the Emberger Alm Hotel at 1,700 meters (5,600 feet). It was the ITT's 20th
annual meeting, and its 9th at this location. The site is becoming well known
for astronomy....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1357_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Last-quarter Moon on October 6th.
* Venus (magnitude -4.1, in Leo) is the bright "Morning Star" shining in the
east before and during dawn.
* Uranus and Neptune (magnitudes 6 and 8, respectively, in Aquarius and
Capricornus) are well placed in the south during evening.

For more details, see This Week's Sky at a Glance and Planet Round up:

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance/

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Copyright 2004 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is provided as a
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*-----------------------------------------------------*
| Stuart Goldman |
* Associate Editor *
| Sky & Telescope |
* 49 Bay State Rd. Sky & Telescope: The Essential *
| Cambridge, MA 02138 Magazine of Astronomy |
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