Sky & Telescope News Bulletin - July 3, 2003

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - July 3, 2003 * * *

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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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MORE MARTIAN DUST?

To quote the baseball great Yogi Berra, "It's déjà vu all over again."
This summer Mars will be the brightest it will ever be in our lifetimes.
But just as in 2001, the last time Mars was bright in the sky, a global
dust storm threatens to block out all observable surface features.

Veteran Mars observer Donald C. Parker reports that significant changes
have taken place on Mars in the last 72 hours. On Wednesday, Parker said,
"I'd call it a dust cloud, not a dust storm." But after looking at images
from Thursday morning, July 3rd, his outlook was far more bleak....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_998_1.asp

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WOMEN IN PROFESSIONAL ASTRONOMY: VENUS RISING

When asked about women in astronomy, most females feel proud recounting
the contributions of luminaries like Caroline Herschel, the first woman to
discover a comet, and Annie Jump Cannon, inventor of the
stellar-classification scheme. In a sense, that pride is justified.
Astronomy has had a long-standing tradition of recognizing women's
contributions.

Still, this past weekend at the Women in Astronomy II (WIA II) conference
at Caltech, 150 attendees learned that, despite ongoing gains, women have
a long way to go to reach fair representation in professional
astronomy....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_993_1.asp

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A MARTIAN POTATO

Since 1999 the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has been beaming
high-resolution views of the red planet back to Earth. So many pictures
have arrived in the past few years that it is easy to forget just how
powerful the satellite's cameras really are. Thankfully, pictures like the
recently released image of Mars's moon Phobos serve as a wake-up call as
to the true capability of the MGS instruments....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_995_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* First-quarter Moon is on Sunday, July 6.
* Using binoculars, pick up Venus 30 minutes before sunrise on Tuesday,
July 8th; it's just above the east-northeast horizon. Saturn, many times
fainter, will be just 1 degree to Venus's lower right (about 1/7 of a
typical binocular's field of view).
* Mars (magnitude -1.6, in Aquarius) rises in the east-southeast around
11:30 p.m. (daylight saving time), shining bright, fiery orange. It's
fairly high in the south before dawn.

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

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

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