September has arrived, and with it a new editorial committee for your favourite monthly magazine. Your new editors are Lori and Raymond Barbour and Chris Penberthy. This new committee is indebted to the sterling work done by their predecessors, last year’s editors, Val and Brian Fraser and they will be a really hard act to follow.

With this in mind, we would like to ask all you regular contributors to please continue with those ever welcome and always enjoyable articles – the magazine is only as good as it is, due to your excellent efforts.

This month we have our regular contributions from Bill Wheaton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Eben van Zyl, and of course, one of those mind teasing puzzles from Lori and Raymond. Brian Fraser, as always, provides a Calendar of celestial events for the next two months and Hugh Lund has sent us an article on photographing the minor planet Eros. We are also starting what will hopefully become a regular item - a monthly personality profile of one of our members.

We are also repeating last month’s reminder ( plea / begging ) regarding the 1998/1999 subscriptions. Your committee has many plans for this coming year, most of which have the unfortunate side-effect of generating requests for payment. We need your subscriptions in order to comply with these requests.

 The 1998/99 Committee of the Johannesburg Centre