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 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - September 24, 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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HUBBLE PRESSES TOWARD COSMIC DAWN

In March, NASA unveiled the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field
(UDF), an 11.3-day exposure that represents humanity's deepest optical
look into the universe. Althought it's smattered with beautiful spiral and
elliptical galaxies lying a few billion light-years from Earth, several
teams of astronomers have focused on the faintest, farthest objects in the
UDF -- tiny red smudges that are barely discernible....

On September 23rd, five teams reported UDF results at a workshop held at
the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. All the
teams agreed that the red smudges represent small galaxies in the very
distant universe bursting with the light of young stars....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1356_1.asp

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STARGAZERS DOUBLE UP IN ILLINOIS

Chicago's distant suburbs may not offer the kind of pitch-black sky that
deep-sky observers crave. But earlier this month the view overhead was
still good enough to draw nearly a thousand stargazers from across the
Midwest for a pair of star parties on successive weekends. The inaugural
Prairie Skies Star Party (PSSP) took place September 9-12 at Camp
Shaw-waw-nas-see, a wooded site about 40 miles south of Chicago and just a
few miles from Kankakee. The following weekend, September 16-19, the 25th
annual Astrofest was held on the grounds of a sprawling farm some 8 miles
west of Kankakee.

The two gatherings have a common history....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1354_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

More Money for Mars

After a 12-day radio blackout as Mars passed on the far side of the Sun
from Earth, the Mars Exploration Rover team has reestablished contact with
both Spirit and Opportunity. The pair have now survived the worst part of
the southern-hemisphere winter and almost as a reward, NASA has granted
the rover team an additional six months of funding to continue surface
operations. Currently Spirit is heading to a high point in the Columbia
Hills, while Opportunity will soon leave Endurance Crater to visit its
heat shield.

Kodak Technical Pan, 1977-2004

Confirming several months of rumors, Eastman Kodak has officially
announced that it is discontinuing production of its Technical Pan film,
which is arguably the finest commercial black-and-white film ever made for
astrophotography. Citing steadily declining demand for the fine-grain,
red-sensitive, high-contrast emulsion, the company acknowledged that its
last production run of Technical Pan film was "several years ago," and
that the film will remain available only until the existing inventory is
depleted. Kodak also noted that the manufacturing equipment and several
key materials used in the production of Technical Pan emulsion were no
longer available, thus ruling out any likelihood of the film being
returned to active manufacture anytime in the foreseeable future.

Kodak introduced Technical Pan Film SO-115 film in 1977 as a
green-sensitive modification of its Solar Flare Patrol Film SO-392
available since the late 1960s (and also marketed as Photomicrography
Monochrome Film SO-410 during the '70s). Soon after, University of Denver
astronomer Edgar Everhart showed that Technical Pan's sensitivity for
long-exposure astrophotography could be dramatically increased by
gas-hypersensitization (S&T: February 1981, page 100). Thus began a nearly
20-year love affair between amateur astrophotographers and gas-hypered
Technical Pan film. The rise of digital imaging in the late 1990s, fueled
by red-sensitive CCDs, led to rapidly declining sales of the film.
Technical Pan film will still be missed, however, especially since there
has never been a competing emulsion that can be used as an astronomical
substitute. Nor has digital imaging yet advanced to the point where it can
fully replace wide-field, film-based astrophotography.

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1353_1.asp

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