Editorial

The Leonids managed to bypass the Earth to a large extent, but seem to have caused an upsurge of interest in meteor spotting and Astronomy as a whole - and this can only be good for us as a society. Now is the time to grab all of your friends who are somewhat interested in the science, and put a pen and membership application form in their hands.

We continue the Relativity series with part 2 of Eben van Zyl's presentation, and also continue the series on "How to make a Star" by Sten Odenwald. Bill Wheaton has submitted a summary of the many interesting and exciting NASA projects which are either on the go or in the pipeline at present, and we were very pleased to hear that the DS1 Ion engine was successfully restarted as the previous issue was going to print, and is still going strong. These engines could make interstellar exploration a viable option. Brian has supplied us with the Sky events for the next couple of months, Danie has given us not one, but four variables of the month, and we have an article from Wolf Lange on a visit he made to the Carl-Zeiss Planetarium in Stuttgart, Germany.

This is the first issue of CANOPUS for 1999, and we once again express a plea for articles for our magazine. There must be plenty of budding authors out there - this is just the place to cut your teeth. We are very kind editors and promise not to reject any of your articles out of hand!

Oh no - not again!!! We really blew it this time! How many of you noticed that the cover of the last CANOPUS said "October" and not "November/December" as it should have! Would you believe that the error was only picked up as the envelopes were being filled. Well maybe your eye was caught by the great picture on the cover, and you never noticed; however, it was picked up by our astute envelope filler and pointed out to us………so once again we apologise.

The Editors

Chris chris@aqua.co.za,

Ray   rbarbour@liberty.co.za

Lori   barbour@global.co.za

 The 1998/99 Committee of the Johannesburg Centre