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News from Sky & Telescope
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Show Your Support for Pluto's Probe
February 3, 2012
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is now just 3½ years from its historic flyby of Pluto. Mission scientists have launched a petition to have the spacecraft commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp — and they want you to sign it!
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SkyWeek TV
February 1, 2012
S&T associate editor Tony Flanders muses on the rewards and challenges of scripting a television program.
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Galaxy in a Bucket
January 30, 2012
A tiny lab experiment could provide additional evidence for how galaxies come by their magnetic fields. The physics isn't new, but that's part of the allure.
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Time Committee Procrastinates
January 27, 2012
An international committee formed to settle the protocol for civilian time once and for all recently announced an important decision — they're going to put off the decision for another three years.
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Opportunity Takes a Bow, Gets Some Rest
January 25, 2012
It's been eight years since NASA dropped twin rovers onto the Martian surface. Spirit succumbed to the planet's harsh conditions in 2010, but Opportunity continues to amaze mission scientists with its longevity and scientific productivity.
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Ancient Astronomers Were No Fools
January 25, 2012
A study of historical star catalogs has turned up a surprising result: long-gone stargazers knew that the stellar magnitudes they observed needed correcting — but the correction is for an atmospheric effect scientists didn’t quantify until the 1700s.
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Norman Edmund, Optics Entrepreneur
January 24, 2012
His company got its start with the military surplus
optics that flooded the marketplace right after World War II. Ever since, Edmund Scientific (now Edmund Optics) has inspired generations of budding astronomers.
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A Bold Plan to Study Dark Energy
January 23, 2012
Beginning later this year, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment will begin to analyze the spectra of one million primordial galaxies — and, its designers hope, get some answers about the mysterious force that's accelerating the expansion of the universe.
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An Evaporating Exoplanet?
January 20, 2012
Brief, variable dips in the light from a low-mass star have left astronomers wondering what strange object could be periodically blocking the starlight. Their hypothesis? A closely-orbiting planet is disintegrating before their eyes.
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Vast New Trove of Variable Stars
January 20, 2012
Newly online: light curves for 198 million stars. The latest great mass of variable-star data comes from the Catalina Sky Survey which is actually looking for asteroids.
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Sky & Telescope March 2012
January 17, 2012
Sky & Telescope's March 2012 issue is now available to digital subscribers.
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Farewell to Rossi's Explorer
January 13, 2012
Last week, NASA engineers reluctantly shut down the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a largely unheralded orbiting outpost that relayed a steady stream of observations for 16 years.
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Black Hole Shoots Bullets
January 11, 2012
Observations of a black hole that spat out twin blobs of superhot material may help astronomers understand how the mysterious beasts create powerful jets that shoot out from their poles. The blobs appeared just as the system went quiet in X-rays.
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Alien Mars Announced
January 11, 2012
Aided by an amateur astronomer, Kepler scientists have detected an exoplanet system containing three sub-Earth-sized planets, the smallest of which is about the size of Mars.
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