Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! It's "mid-time of night and the stars in their orbits shone pale through the light of the brighter cold Moon." But, be sure to take the time to "gaze for awhile on her cold smile"! There will be a brief opportunity this week to hide from that light to catch the Geminid meteor shower, as well as plenty of time to check out bright planets, stars and clusters. So turn your eyes to the skies, because...

Here's what's up!

Even through scientists have no idea what dark matter really is, they're able to see its effect on regular matter, and use this data to build a map of where it's clustered. Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to map the dark matter in two very young galaxy clusters. Their observations lend evidence to the theory that galaxies form at the densest regions of dark matter.

Two of Saturn's moons, Rhea and Dione posed for Cassini in this photograph. The lower moon is Dione, which has been much more geologically active in the past than Rhea. Dione has a smoother surface and linear depressions, while Rhea looks quite pummeled by impacts, like our own Moon. When Cassini took this image, Rhea was 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) away, and Dione was 1.2 million kilometers (800,000 miles) away.

For more than 400 years, the Earth's magnetic North pole was in a roughly stable position, but now it's on the move, having drifted nearly 1,100 km (680 miles) in the last century. At this rate, it'll move out of Canada, and into Siberia in the next 50 years. If that happens, Alaska and Northern Canada may lose the beautiful Northern Lights, which are caused by the interaction of the magnetic pole and the solar wind. It could be that this is a normal oscillation of the magnetic pole, or it might be that the Earth's magnetic poles are getting ready to flip.

The Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft has moved approximately 550 km (340 miles) away from Asteroid Itokawa, beginning the journey back to Earth. Unfortunately, it appears that the spacecraft probably failed to pick up a sample from the asteroid. JAXA officials now think that a metal bullet designed to blast material off of Itokawa's surface probably failed to fire. Hayabusa is severely damaged, and will attempt to make the return journey to Earth, but managers aren't optimistic about its chances.

Volunteers with the Women International Space Simulation for Exploration (WISE) campaign have wrapped up 60 days of bedrest, simulating the effects of weightlessness on the human body. The 24 women spent two months in medical beds which were slightly tilted head down. The data collected during the study will help prepare astronauts for long-duration spaceflight, but it'll also help researchers working on medical problems here on Earth too.

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts has recently awarded a Phase II grant for a unique robot design that could hop across the surface of Mars. An array of these tiny robots could be deployed on Mars, coordinating with one another like a swarm of insects. Dr. Penelope Boston speaks to Astrobiology Magazine about the research and future potential for this direction of robotic exploration.

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 [email protected] 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Astronomers from Rice University have created an amazing movie of jets of plasma blasting out of a newborn star. This series of images taken five years apart by the Hubble Space Telescope allow astronomers to track how material flows out of the star. Faster moving particles crash into slower moving material, and the resulting traffic jams create the spectacular shapes in space.

Germany's Carl Zeiss Optronics has signed a contract to supply the optical system for two instruments to be installed on the James Webb Space Telescope; the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Due for launch in 2013 on board an Ariane rocket, the telescope will be stationed at a stable position in space called the Lagrangian point L2. JWST will be cooled down to -230 degrees Celsius so that it's highly sensitive infrared instruments can peer through clouds of gas and dust.

This image of Saturn shows the giant planet's southwest edge, and a hint of thread-like cloud features. The edge of the planet looks smooth, but right at the terminator (the edge between light and dark), it's possible to see these cloud features. The long shadows make the height differences in the clouds visible. Cassini took this image on October 30, 2005 when the spacecraft was 401,000 kilometers (249,000 miles) from Saturn.

The history of our nearby Universe has been dominated by galactic collisions. More than half of the nearby galaxies have collided other galaxies in the last 2 billion year according to data from two comprehensive sky surveys. By processing 126 galaxies in the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey and the Multiwavelength Survey by Yale/Chile, researchers have found that 53% of galaxies have evidence of long tails of stars trailing away from them; the result of a recent galactic collision.

This perspective view shows the hilly terrain on Saturn's moon Titan. The image has been colour coded to show the altitude, with red being the highest areas, and blue the lowest. Stereo images were taken by Huygens as it descended into Titan's atmosphere earlier this year, and then the 3-D terrain was rendered in computer.

This Cassini photo shows two of Saturn's moons, Dione and Enceladus floating just beneath the ringplane. Smaller Enceladus is on the right, and measures 505 kilometers (314 miles across). Dione is further away at the top left, and measures 1,126 kilometers (700 miles across). This image was taken on October 15, 2005, when Cassini was 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Dione and 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Enceladus.

On December 11, NASA's Opportunity rover will join its partner Spirit to celebrate a full Martian year on the Red Planet. Both rovers will now have experienced all of the Martian seasons, and now they're nearing the end of the Martian summer. Opportunity is currently exploring exposed bedrock along a route between Endurance and Victoria craters, and recently found rock that seems to be younger than what it discovered inside Endurance crater. These rocks seem to be petrified sand dunes, and show a longer term cycle of wetness and dryness in the region.