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diffuse thru the club's litterature.

Special events 
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    Right at the end of February, on the 29th, is an Urban Park 
Rangers celebration of leapday. It's at Belvedere Castle in Central 
Park, Manhattan, starting at 19h. The session convenes clear or cloud, 
but is called off for rain/snow or excessive cold. Pleade come while 
there's still daylight, to better see your way and greet the Rangers. 
    NYSkies, and the NYC chapter of National Space Society, assist the 
Rangers by handling astronomy and space inquiries from the visitors. 
In clear skies, they'll do star ID and small-scope viewing of the 
planets and Moon. If you're in the City, come on over to the Castle, 
roughly half between the Metropolitan Museum and American Museum, in 
the Park. 

Skywatching 
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    February was kind to us by winter standards, no extremes of 
temperature or wind, only a thin snowfall now and then. Skies were on 
and off clear, so we ended up with a good mix of wonderfully starry 
nights and nights when we curled up indoors with a good book. 
    We lost the graze occultation of eta Leonis for rain or cloud. On 
that night there were roving showers over the City starting in 
afternoon, which simply offered no hope of dissipating. 
    A gaggle of NYSkiers had a star-social on Mary Carlson's rooftop 
in Yorkville, Manhattan, on Friday 13 February. Skies were a notch 
less so than normal clear. Stars of just quite 4th magnitude were 
spotted by the better-sighted members. Rich Rosenberg gave a sky tour, 
pointing out the Winter Hexagon. Alice Barner had her go-to scope, 
which gave crisp clean views of Saturn and Orion Nebula. Charlie 
Ridgway used his handheld computer to display starcharts and astronews 
images. John Pazmino handed out computer starcharts with the 
allegorical creatures enveloping the stars and took a flock of digipix 
of the group. Others who enjoyed the good felllowship were Antoinette 
Booth, Tony Hoffman, and Jane Levenson. 
    On Monday the 23rd we had lovely views of the Moon-Venus 
conjunction. The sky was one of the darker ones with a sprinkling of 
tiny stars around the two orbs. NYSkiers watched from all over the 
territory, even from, in my own case, a subway train on Manhattan 
Bridge. With both sides of the Bridge now in service, see 'New York', 
I made sure to ride on the south side tracks, offering a good 
sightline to Venus and Moon. 
    NYSkies is looking forward to the February 29th leapday show in 
Central Park. This is the first formal participation of NYSkies in an 
Urban Park Ranger event! (It had a delegate at the American Urban Star 
Fest in October 2003, being the only outside astronomer on hand. The 
Fest ended up being rained out.) We'll be joined by the National Space 
Society's NYC chapter. 
    After leapday is over and gone, we got the unusual spectacle in 
March of all five of the classical planets sitting in the evening sky 
at once! They'll string out from west to east in twilight: Mercury, 
Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. 

New York
 ------
    On February 8th I and a colleague, with 450 or so other New York 
scientists and engineers, were judges at the Science and Engineering 
Fair. Held at City College of New York, I posted an account of it in 
NYSkies a few days later. There were many astronomy or space projects 
among the 1,000ish displays, including a couple I evaluated. 
    The mass shuffling of subway routes on February 22nd seems so far 
to be working out well. The changes make use of all four Manhattan 
Bridge tracks now being in operation. 
    Remember, the Bridge made do with one or the other single pair 
since the last flyover of Halley's comet! With the second pair, the 
bridge can move about 100 trains per hour in each direction. I 
doubt if this many are actually dispatched, but the capacity is there. 
    To celebrate the increased Manhattan Bridge service, the March of 
Dimes runs an excursion on Saturday and Sunday, February 28 and 29. 
It'll rent a set of nostalgia coaches and run it back and forth on 
both sides of the bridge and on many of the lines that the bridge now 
feeds. If you must ask, yes, I'm taking this ride. 
    In February the NYC Department of Transportation reported for year 
2003 the fatalities suffered in automobile accidents, both for 
riders/drivers and pedestrians. 
    Guess what?
    New York City scored the LOWEST number and rate of such deaths 
SINCE 1912!! The two years are tied with 344. Bear in mind that this 
is for a population of 9-1/2 million and some 1.2 million vehicles 
entering Manhattan on a weekday!! 
    In 1912 the automobile was still a novelty and streets were worked 
with animal-hauled carts and wagons. Since then the death toll rose, 
peaking in the 1930s at around 1,200 per year. It declined slightly 
toward the end of the 20th century, but stayed in the high hundreds. 
Car accidents were, in the 1980s, one of the top-ranking cause of 
death for cityfolk. 
    Starting in 2000, a sudden decline set in. Mayor Giuliani and then 
Bloomberg instituted several traffic reforms, both structural and 

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