Hubble Confirms New Moons of Pluto

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of two new moons around the distant planet Pluto. The moons were first discovered by Hubble in May 2005, but the Pluto Companion Search team probed even deeper into the Pluto system with Hubble on Feb. 15 to look for additional satellites and to characterize the orbits of the moons. In the image, Pluto is in the center and Charon is just below it. The moons, provisionally designated S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2, are located to the right of Pluto and Charon.

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LunarPhase Pro V2.51 Released

The V2.51 upgrade for LunarPhase Pro is now available.

There's a new screen called "Apogee/Perigee Phase Correlation" which
shows when the major phases (full, new, first & last quarters) occur
near Perigee or Apogee. The screen's available from the "Reports" menu.

I've also upgraded the Eclipse Circumstances screen so that it now
shows the entry and exit positions of the Moon in relation to the
Umbral and Penumbral shadows.

There's a couple of bug fixes in this release as well: A bug in
identifying features by clicking on maps in the Lunar Explorer has
been fixed. This bug only occurred for the very largest features on
the Moon. The last letter in month names for the Apogee & Perigee
figures on the main LunarPhase Pro screen sometimes became corrupted.
Now fixed.

Regards,

Gary.

New Comet

A new comet is emerging in the morning sky. Comet Pojmanski has been brightening since its discovery in January and can now be found just east of Venus before sunrise. The best way to see the comet is through binoculars or a small telescope: It looks like a fuzzy 5th-magnitude star with a small tail.

Sky Publishing Corporation has sold its business to New Track Media LLC

It seems that Sky Publishing Corporation, the privately held publisher of Sky & Telescope and astronomy books, announced today that it has completed the sale of its business to New Track Media LLC, an entity formed in the fall of 2005 by Stephen J. Kent and Boston Ventures.

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Night Sky Observer Forum Goes Live

A forum has been added to the Night Sky Observer website where folks can do the usual BBS thing.

Since the forum is brand new, there's no threads in it yet - so get posting!

The forum cam be reached at:
http://forum.nightskyobserver.com