Editorial
This month's editorial brings with it some sad news...due to business commitments, our secretary, Ed Finlay, has had to tender his resignation from the committee. Ed has been a very active member and organiser, and we will miss his input at the monthly committee meetings.
Thanks for all you've done for the committee, Ed.
A lot has been said regarding the arrival of the Leonids - Brian Fraser and Chris Stewart have both mentioned them in their articles. Unfortunately, we missed seeing them but we include an account from George Zay that captures some of the thrill. Bill Wheaton has submitted a great article on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) project. For those of you that missed Eben van Zyl's interesting and lively talk on Relativity at October’s monthly meeting - good news - we are running it as a series over the next couple of issues of CANOPUS. In addition we share the news of the discovery of the 1000th pulsar in early November by the team at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. There are details of the new mission proposals received by NASA, reports on the Ion Engine tests on DS1, the intrigues of stellar evolution are explored in another series and Sunspot activity forecasts are also discussed. We included a guide to buying stars for those of you who are feeling generous this month or have delusions of grandeur…
Please take a careful look at our cover. It sports the Observatory site under better viewing conditions. We would like to have a cover photograph/image every month but want this to be of special interest to the Johannesburg Centre. Particularly we were hoping that those of you who dabble in Astrophotography would share some of the spoils of your ventures (all credit will be given – and if there is a story behind the photograph we’d like to share it.) Any suggestions of possible features/ series you’d like included are also welcome.
This is the ultimate issue of CANOPUS for 1998, and we would like to wish you a memorable Festive Season.
Chris chris@aqua.co.za
Ray rbarbour@liberty.co.za
Lori barbour@global.co.za
P.S. Please don’t get too festive, as we’d like to see you in 1999.