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| Year in Space 2006 Giveaway! |
Dec 8, 2005 - It's giveaway time again. The folks at Year in Space have agreed to award a free copy of the Year in Space 2006 calendar to one lucky Universe Today reader. As usual, send an email to info@universetoday.com with the subject line "Year in Space 2006 Giveaway" before 8pm PST on Sunday, December 11. I'll pick one email randomly as the winner. If you haven't already, check out the calendar here. I'll only keep these emails for a few days and then delete them all, so they won't be used for anything else.
Good luck!
Fraser Cain
Publisher, Universe Today (Full Story) |
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| Book Review: Miss Leavitt's Stars |
| Dec 8, 2005 - Press the correct buttons and the ATM spits out the cash you need for the weekend's jaunt. Lying behind the machine's panel, cables connect the ATM to computers that process millions of such transactions every second. Before this nano-age, people kept track of numbers using paper, pencil and an unfailing eye that looked at one item then the next. These human computers supported financiers and as George Johnson tells in his book, Miss Leavitt's Stars, they were also the backbone of early 20th century astronomy. (Full Story) |
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| Saturn's Graceful Crescent |
| Dec 8, 2005 - This beautiful photograph of Saturn was taken when Cassini was lined up directly with the planet's rings. The black line near the top of the photograph are the rings. It's possible to see the intricate cloud patterns across the planet's surface, especially right at the terminator, which separates day from night. Cassini took this image on October 31, 2005 when it was 1.2 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn. (Full Story) |
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| The Lunar Ejecta and Meteorites Experiment (LEAM). Image credit: NASA Click to enlarge |
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| Dust Storms on the Moon |
| Dec 8, 2005 - When the Sun rises on the Moon after two weeks of lunar night, the dust begins to stir. This dust storm stretches right across the Moon at the terminator (the line between day and night), from pole to pole. An instrument left by the Apollo astronauts to detect micrometeorite impacts first spotted this strange phenomenon. It could be that the night side of the Moon is negatively charged, and the day side is positively charged. As the terminator shifts across the Moon, it picks up the dust and shifts it sideways. (Full Story) |
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| Smaller Ozone Hole This Year |
| Dec 7, 2005 - The ozone hole that developed above Antarctica looks smaller this year than previous years, based on observations from NASA's Aura satellite. The largest hole was measured in 1998; almost triple the size of 1985's hole. The temperature of the atmosphere above Antarctica seems to be one of the biggest factors deciding the size of the ozone hole - the colder it gets, the more ozone that's destroyed. (Full Story) |
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| False-color views of Saturn's cratered, icy moons, Rhea and Dione. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI Click to enlarge |
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| New Views of Saturn's Moons |
| Dec 7, 2005 - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has wrapped up a successful year exploring Saturn's icy moons, and scientists have released a new set of images to celebrate. New images of Rhea were taken during Cassini's November 26th flyby, when the spacecraft dipped within 500 km (310 miles) of Rhea's surface. Other images include "zoomable" mosaics of Rhea and Hyperion taken at high resolution. (Full Story) |
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