Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Sep 3

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - September 3, 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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ECLIPSE CHASERS GATHER NEAR LONDON

From basic eclipse observation tips to complex solar physics, 25 presentations
fascinated the more than 100 amateur and professional attendees from 20 nations
at the 2004 Solar Eclipse Conference. The event, which was organized by Patrick
and Joanne Poitevin, was held August 20-22 at the Open University in Milton
Keynes, England.

Solar physicist Serge Koutchmy (Institute of Astrophysics, Paris) explained how
amateur and professional astronomers could obtain high-resolution images of the
corona during total eclipses...

Jay Pasachoff (Williams College) described current solar-eclipse science,
including how the solar magnetic field heats the corona....

Many of the presentations and posters focused on eclipses in history....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1343_1.asp

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AMATEUR DETECTS EXOPLANET TRANSIT

On August 24th, a team of professional astronomers announced the discovery of
TrES-1, an extrasolar planet that transits its host star. Just 8 days later, an
amateur astronomer from Landen, Belgium detected a transit of the same planet.
The discovery highlights the growing capabilities of amateur astronomers and
proves that amateurs can, in principle, discover an exoplanet by the transit
method.

Tonny Vanmunster used a Celestron C-14 telescope and an SBIG ST-7XME CCD camera
(without filters) at his private CBA Belgium Observatory to detect the TrES-1
transit....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1344_1.asp

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TWO MORE NEPTUNE-MASS EXOPLANETS

The planet-hunting team led by Geoffrey W. Marcy (University of California,
Berkeley) and R. Paul Butler (Carnegie Institution of Washington) continues to
push the exoplanet envelope. As if discovering or codiscovering 98 of the 135
or so known planets around other stars weren't enough, the team has announced
two new ones with minimum masses just 15 and 21 times that of Earth. Because we
don't know the inclination of these planets' orbits, the most likely masses are
roughly 18 and 25 Earths -- slightly more massive than Neptune, which contains
17.2 Earth masses. These worlds, along with a third Neptune-mass body announced
last week by the Swiss team led by Michel Mayor, are the lightest planets yet
discovered around normal stars. (The Swiss discovery has not yet been accepted
for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.)

All three new planets orbit their stars extremely closely, which explains why
such planetary lightweights could be found....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1341_1.asp

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A NEW COMET MACHHOLZ

Veteran observer Donald E. Machholz of Colfax, California, has discovered a
telescopic comet in the constellation Eridanus. IAU Circular 8394 announced the
find on August 27th. When discovered earlier that day, the comet was drifting
slowly southeastward toward Lepus.

From 38 observations over a four-day period, Brian G. Marsden (Minor Planet
Center) has calculated a preliminary orbit for this new interloper, officially
designated C/2004 Q2. The comet is headed toward the Sun, and over the next two
months it will migrate as far south as declination -30 degrees.

But then its motion across the sky will turn sharply northward, making the
comet well positioned for Northern Hemisphere observers by year's end....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1333_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

SETI False Alarm

Astronomy discussion groups have been abuzz over an article in the September
1st issue of the British magazine New Scientist, titled "Mysterious signals
from 1000 light years away." The article describes a possible extraterrestrial
signal that has been turned up by the SETI@home project. Alas, the story is
unfounded; the signal in question is only what's expected to happen at random
from time to time in a data base as massive as SETI@home's. Dan Werthimer,
science director of SETI@home, told the BBC "It's all hype. We don't have
anything we are excited about." In fact the signal has been correctly described
on SETI@home's Web site for many months.

XingMing Zhou (1965-2004)

Well-known Chinese comet hunter XingMing Zhou died last August 5th from severe
head trauma that he sustained in a motorcycle accident near Liancheng in Fujian
province. He was 39. Zhou is survived by his wife, Xin Yu, and daughter,
Yingzhen.

Zhou was one of the world's most successful discoverers of comets recorded by
the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) satellite. He found 63 sungrazing
and non-sungrazing comets on images obtained with SOHO's coronagraphs as well
as one with the SWAN instrument. The latter has been designated as Comet SWAN,
C/2004 H6.

Fred Whipple (1906-2004)

Fred Whipple, famed astronomer and the originator of the "dirty snowball"
theory of comets, died August 30th. He was 97. "Dr. Comet" as he was
affectionately called, made a name for himself as an accomplished astronomer
long before his groundbreaking 1950 Astrophysical Journal paper entitled "A
Comet Model. I. The Acceleration of Comet Encke." In that work Whipple found
that Comet Encke had looped around the Sun at least 1,000 times. To survive so
many orbits, Whipple proposed that Encke must have been made of a
conglomeration of ices. These likely included water, carbon dioxide, carbon
monoxide, methane, and perhaps ammonia. Close to four decades later, spacecraft
observations of Comet Halley proved that the "dirty snowball" theory was
correct -- the comet was indeed a frozen nucleus of gases and ice.

Whipple served as the director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
from 1955 until his retirement in 1973. After that he stayed active in science.
At age 92 he was named to the research team for NASA's since-failed Comet
Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR), which was to visit Comet Encke among other targets.

President John F. Kennedy awarded Whipple the President's Award for
Distinguished Public Service in 1963. He received the prize for his work
tracking orbiting satellites. In 1982 the Smithsonian Observatory's facility on
Mount Hopkins, Arizona, was renamed the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory.
Asteroid 1940 is also named in his honor. He is survived by his wife, Babette,
two daughters, Sandra and Laura, and son, Earle. The date for a memorial
service will be announced in the coming months.

Beagle 2's Postmortem

When the Beagle 2 lander detached from the Mars Express orbiter on December 19,
2003, the bicycle-wheel-size craft was to parachute to the Martian surface and
conduct a host of experiments, including a search for fossilized or extant life
in the top soil. But after it was released, scientists never heard from it
again.

In a report issued by the Beagle 2 team (though not endorsed by the European
Space Agency or the United Kingdom's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research
Council), mission scientists and engineers speculated why the lander never
phoned home. While no specific cause could be isolated as the lone reason for
the failure, there are some who believe that models of the Martian atmosphere
were incorrect enough to cause a catastrophic failure upon entry. Both the Mars
Exploration Rovers and Mars Express missions found the atmospheric density from
20 to 40 kilometers above the surface in early January to be much lower than
predicted. Beagle 2 was to enter Mars's atmophere on December 25th. Other
problems, such as damage to the lander's antenna upon touchdown, are still
possible. To date there has been no sign of Beagle 2 from orbiting spacecraft.

The ultimate gremlin might have been administrative in nature. Beagle 2 was
created on a shoestring budget of only $60 million. It was a piggyback
component to the Mars Express mission that was forced to meet specific mass and
size requirements before being allowed aboard. As the team states in its
report, "The primary lesson is, however, that a lander cannot be treated as an
'instrument,' i.e., as an addition to an orbiter. Appropriate priority
including funding, schedule, and resources (mass, etc.) must be given to a
lander in any future mission."

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1338_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Last-quarter on Monday September 6th.
* Venus (magnitude -4.2, in Gemini) shines brightly high in the east before and
during dawn -- the bright Morning Star.
* The waning crescent Moon shines left of Venus and Saturn at dawn on the
10th.

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

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

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| Sky & Telescope |
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