Editorial

Plenty of Summer heat around of late - sometimes quite late into the evening, and unfortunately, still accompanied by enough cloud to cause some minor irritation when setting up to do some viewing. Beautiful sunsets though, so if the telescope can’t do its job effectively, take out the old camera and snap some of those sunsets instead. Have you noticed how, when you’ve just set up to follow some favourite object, it suddenly fades by several magnitudes?…….darn clouds!

In between the cloud, Jupiter is like a searchlight overhead at midnight and Saturn still presents a pretty picture where it is currently situated by the Hyades close to Aldebaran. Interesting difference in colours and brightness. Venus is not doing too much at present, but this should soon be remedied.

Our friend at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bill Wheaton, has taken time out of an extremely busy work schedule to submit an article about the investigation of Space at microwave wavelengths and more specifically covering the spacecraft doing these studies at present, while Wolf Lange returns to these pages after a break with his informative, sometimes humorous, "A to Zee of Astronomee". Welcome back to both of you.

Eben van Zyl moves on to another astronomical discovery in his article covering milestones in Radio Astronomy and we again have our little guide to Internet Astrosites compliments of Evan Dembskey.

Brian Fraser has supplied us with the heavenly guide for the next 2 months. Remember, if you need the tables for the Sun, Moon and Planets - just dive into the website where they will shortly be loaded covering the whole year.

LIBRARY BOOKS – each year at this time we carry out an audit of our Library to check for damaged and/or missing books. We have not received very many returns and lots of our books are still out there, so please, if you are currently in possession of any books/magazines/videos or anything else borrowed from the Library, would you please return it so that it can be checked.

The Editor - chris@penberthy.co.za

 The 2001/2 Committee of the Johannesburg Centre