Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Nov 19

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - November 19, 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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SOMETHING WARM IN A VERY DARK PLACE

They teach in school that stars form in gas-and-dust clouds that collapse under
the influence of their own gravity. It sounds simple, but how it actually
happens is complicated, confusing, and somewhat mysterious. It's like telling a
visitor to Earth, "Water runs downhill." True enough, but that hardly captures
the essence of Victoria Falls, the Mississippi Delta, or a trout stream in the
Vermont woods.

A key gap in our star-forming knowledge is just what happens as a shapeless,
collapsing cloud knot turns into a symmetrical, rotating disk around a central
pre-star. The action is hidden from view inside dark nebular blobs -- "cloud
cores"-- where anything could be going on unseen. Looking inside these
star-forming globules is one reason why NASA built and launched the infrared
Spitzer Space Telescope.

A team of 30 astronomers has used Spitzer to examine dozens of dark cloud
cores....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1391_1.asp

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IMAGE PROCESSING FROM THE CUTTING EDGE

With the emergence of the Internet as the main form of communication in the
astronomy community, amateurs often correspond for years without ever meeting
and exchanging ideas on a personal level. With this in mind, amateur imager
Steve Mandel saw a need to put a face on the names behind the emails and forum
posts, as well as the potential for great strides to be made in digital
astrophotography processing and imaging. Out of this idea was born the Advanced
Imaging Conference (AIC). CCD astrophotographers from around the globe
converged on San Jose, California, the weekend of November 6th for the first
AIC. With an attendance limit of 140, registration filled up weeks before the
event, guaranteeing that this will be an annual occurrence. "The presentations
were superb and almost everyone wants to do this again next year," says Mandel.
"We are already planning for 2005."

Imagers from as far away as Chile were treated to presentations by a host of
expert astrophotographers. Many of the talks focused around the debate of what
is "true color" in astrophotography....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1393_1.asp

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URANUS WEATHER PICKS UP

If you had to vote for the most boring planet, you might pick Uranus.
Unenhanced Voyager 2 images from its 1986 flyby revealed a bland,
monochromatic, turquoise countenance with few clouds or belts. But recent
near-infrared images from the 10-meter Keck II telescope in Hawaii demonstrate
the old maxim that first impressions can be deceiving.

The images, taken in 2003 and 2004 with adaptive optics to counter atmospheric
blurring, revealed dozens of discrete clouds, which is more than the total seen
in all previous observations combined up to the year 2000....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1390_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

A Comet Turns On

What began as the routine discovery of a near-Earth asteroid on October 10th
took on a curious and dramatic twist a month later when the new find suddenly
developed a narrow tail. Franco Mallia, Gianluca Masi, and Roger Wilcox first
spotted the pencil-thin appendage in CCD images they'd taken on November 11th
with a 0.36-meter reflector at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The tail
independently turned up in CCD frames taken less than a day later by Juan
Lacruz in La Canada, Spain. No one yet knows what caused the tail to form (two
other asteroids-turned-comets, 107P/Wilson-Harrington and 133P/Elst-Pizarro,
have been discovered in recent decades). But observers are certain it wasn't
there when Rob McNaught first recorded the asteroid, designated 2004 TU12,
using a 0.5-meter Schmidt telescope at Australia's Siding Spring Observatory. A
preliminary orbit issued by the Minor Planet Center puts Comet Siding Spring
(now bearing the official comet designation P/2004 TU12) between the orbits of
Earth and Mars, near the perihelion of a looping, 5.3-year-long track. At 14th
magnitude, it's too faint to be seen visually in small telescopes.

Europe's SMART 1 Orbits the Moon

The European Space Agency's (ESA) first Small Missions for Advanced Research in
Technology spacecraft (SMART 1) has reached lunar orbit after a year in space.
On November 11th, after 322 Earth orbits, the spacecraft finally crossed the
weak stability region at the L1 Lagrangian point between the Earth and Moon. On
November 15th SMART 1 came within 5,000 kilometers of the lunar surface in
essentially the most loosely bound lunar orbit ever achieved.

SMART 1's ion-propelled engine -- which provides very low thrust for very long
durations -- will gradually lower the orbital altitude and bind the craft more
tightly to the Moon. By January SMART 1 should be looping between 300 and 3,000
km from the lunar surface, at which point its instruments will begin examining
the terrain and hunting for ice at the poles.

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1392_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Mercury is at greatest elongation on Saturday, November 20th. Look for it
just above the southwest horizon in bright twilight.
* Full Moon on Friday, November 26th.
* Saturn (magnitude 0.0) rises in the east around 8:30 or 9 p.m., glowing to
the lower right of Pollux and Castor in Gemini.

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

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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