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 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - July 30, 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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ASTRONOMY DAY 2004 EFFORTS LAUDED

Since 1989 SKY & TELESCOPE has honored amateur organizations whose events
and displays best exemplify Astronomy Day's goal of "Bringing Astronomy to
the People." On July 24th, at the AstroCon 2004 awards ceremony in
California, the Georgia Southern Planetarium and the Statesboro Astronomy
Club were honored for this year's winning effort....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1312_1.asp

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LENSING STAR WEIGHED

Astronomers have a new set of scales for measuring the masses of stars -
by watching the way a star's gravity bends the light of a distant
background star. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity,
every massive object warps the space around it, deflecting the path of
anything -- including light -- that passes nearby. Thus, a massive star's
gravity can act like a magnifying glass, making the stars it passes in
front of appear to brighten, a phenomenon called microlensing.

In 1993 the Massive Compact Halo Object (MACHO) project, which surveyed
millions of stars for signs of microlensing, recorded a very unusual event
in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy
of the Milky Way. A star in the LMC brightened and faded over a period of
75 days, but unlike in other microlensing events, the star's color seemed
to change too. That's because the lensing star, which is usually too faint
to see in these passages, was uncharacteristically bright and contributed
its own light. In fact the star was bright enough for the Hubble Space
Telescope to image it several times after it had drifted away from the
line of sight to the background star....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1311_1.asp

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DOES CLARISSA HAVE A MOON?

In spite of recent indications that asteroid 302 Clarissa has a moon
circling around it, evidence now suggests that the object may be alone in
the cosmos after all. On June 24th, four observers in the northeastern
United States watched as the asteroid occulted the star SAO 118999.
Astronomers predicted that the magnitude 9.6 star would drop in brightness
for about 1.8 seconds as Clarissa eclipsed it. But surprisingly, three
observers, David Dunham, Frank Suits, and Michael Richmond, timed a much
longer extinction -- almost 3 seconds -- indicating the asteroid was
larger, and therefore covered the star longer than predicted.

Preliminary calculations by David Dunham, president of the International
Occultation Timing Association, suggested that Clarissa is 64 kilometers
long by 35 km wide, nearly twice its expected diameter. Yet the fourth
observation, taken by Phil Dombrowski, was much shorter than predicted,
only a 0.25-second-long disappearance. Dunham initially reported this
short observation to be a possible companion of Clarissa, perhaps one 5 or
6 km across. Dombrowski observed the event visually and recorded it on
video from outside the predicted path where he should have seen any
dimming, suggesting that he observed a mini moon swinging past the star.

Dombrowski's moonlet observation hasn't held up to further scrutiny,
however....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1307_1.asp

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IS THE JULY 31ST FULL MOON REALLY "BLUE"?

On Saturday evening, July 31st, a full Moon will rise for the second time
this month (the first time was on July 2nd). Many people call the second
full Moon in a calendar month a "blue Moon" and use the
expression "once
in a blue Moon" to mean something that occurs only rarely. While the
latter meaning can be traced back centuries, the former definition is much
newer -- and it's wrong....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1310_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

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