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 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - January 21, 2005 * * *

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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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WILD, WEIRD TITAN REVEALS MORE SECRETS

Saturn's big moon Titan is turning out to be the most Earthlike world in
the solar system -- except that it is utterly, weirdly, wildly different
from Earth.

Early Friday morning scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) and
NASA held a press conference in Paris to describe the latest findings they
have teased out of the data sent back by ESA's Huygens probe on Titan. On
January 14th Huygens parachuted through the big moon's thick, cloudy
atmosphere down to a soft landing on a muddy, pebbly floodplain overlooked
by icy headlands. Huygens succeeded beyond all expectations, continuing to
transmit for several hours before succumbing to Titan's extreme cold....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1447_1.asp

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OPPORTUNITY FINDS AN IRON METEORITE

On December 21, 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity arrived at
its own discarded heat shield, enabling engineers to study the effects of
atmospheric entry up close so they can design better landing systems for
future missions. But rover images of the shield revealed something else
interesting just a few meters away: a pitted, metallic-looking rock the
size of a basketball. Opportunity's handlers immediately speculated that
the rock was a meteorite. Tests conducted earlier this week with
Opportunity's spectrometers prove that this hunch was correct. The
so-called "Heat Shield Rock" is indeed a meteorite composed mostly of iron
and nickel. It is the first meteorite discovered on another planet....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1446_1.asp

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DAVID LUNT (1942-2005)

David Lunt, founder and principal optical designer of Coronado Technology
Group in Tucson, Arizona, died on January 16th after a 22-month battle
with cancer. He was 62 years old.

Coronado burst on the scene in the late 1990s with a new line of
affordable, convenient hydrogen-alpha solar filters. These narrowband
filters enable users of small telescopes to observe the Sun's
chromosphere, the thin, active layer above the photosphere, or visible
"surface." Seen in hydrogen-alpha light, the Sun appears alive, with
ruby-red prominences jutting from the limb, dark filaments crossing the
disk, and bright flares erupting around sunspots....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1444_1.asp

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STANDING ON THE SURFACE OF TITAN

January 14th was a day of high drama in space, the type unseen in Europe
for decades. After its 7.5-year interplanetary journey, the Huygens
spacecraft finally reached its objective: the atmosphere of Saturn's moon
Titan. And it was worth the long wait, as each of the probe's half-dozen
instruments worked as planned or even better. Less than 24 hours after
Huygens's historic descent, tired but elated mission scientists were
already sharing their findings about water ice and methane on the moon's
surface, haze in its atmosphere, possible drainage channels, and much
more....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1443_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Full Moon on Tuesday, January 25th.
* Saturn (magnitude -0.3, in Gemini) shines brightly in the east after
nightfall, to the lower right of Pollux and Castor and farther to the
upper left of Procyon.
* The Sun has been particularly active this past week. As of Friday,
January 21st, a severe geomagnetic storm was in progress. Sky watchers at
all latitudes should be alert for auroras.

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

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