Used by permission

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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
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