Sunrises and sunsets often dazzle, but they'll have a special ring to them in a few days for people in the western United States and eastern Asia: The moon will slide across the sun, blocking everything but a blazing halo of light.

It's been almost two decades since a "ring of fire" eclipse was visible in the continental US. To celebrate the end of that drought, nearly three dozen national parks in the path of the eclipse will host viewing parties.

The solar spectacle is first seen in eastern Asia at dawn on Monday, local time. Weather permitting, millions of early risers in southern China, northern Taiwan and southeast Japan will be able to catch the ring eclipse. Then it creeps across the Pacific with the western US viewing the tail end. The late day sun will transform into a glowing ring in southwest Oregon, Northern California, central Nevada, southern Utah, northern Arizona and New Mexico and finally the Texas Panhandle where it will occur at sunset on Sunday. For three-and-a-half hours, the eclipse follows an 13,700-mile path. Viewing, from beginning to end, lasts about two hours. The ring phenomenon lasts as long as 5 minutes depending on location.

Outside this narrow band, parts of the West, Midwest and South - and portions of Canada and Mexico - will be treated to a partial eclipse. The Eastern Seaboard of the US will be shut out, but people can log online to sites such as the Slooh Space Camera, which plans to broadcast the event live. A ring eclipse - technically called an annular solar eclipse - is not as dramatic as a total eclipse, when the disk of the sun is entirely blocked by the moon. As in a total solar eclipse, the moon crosses in front of the sun, but the moon is too far from Earth and appears too small in the sky to blot out the sun completely. "A bright ring around the sun at mid-eclipse is still pretty cool," Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory said in an email.

Asia is abuzz over the event. In Japan, cable cars will run early to give tourists an unobstructed view from the mountains. Ferries will make special trips so that others can enjoy the scene offshore. The Taipei Astronomical Museum will open its doors at dawn while Hong Kong's Space Museum will set up solar-filtered telescopes outside its building on the Kowloon waterfront.

The last time this type of eclipse was seen in the US was in 1994. This year's solar show offers ringside seats at 33 national parks along the eclipse path including the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon. A partial eclipse can be viewed from another 125 national parks.

For die-hard sky gazers, six US locations will see the moon cover about 95 per cent of the sun's diametre. They include the Petroglyph National Monument, Redwoods National Park, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Zion National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

And in two weeks, Venus will crawl across the face of the sun - a rare occurrence known as the "transit of Venus". Veteran eclipse chaser Jay Pasachoff has traveled to remote corners of the globe to see the moon take a bite of the sun. This time, the Williams College astronomer will travel to New Mexico with his students to collect data. Sunday's event will be his 14th ring eclipse and 55th solar eclipse overall. So what does someone who has seen it all look forward to? Seeing "the symmetry of a ring of sunlight around the dark silhouette of the moon," Mr Pasachoff said in an email. The next ring eclipse won't be visible in the US for more than a decade - October 2023.

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Washington: ESA's Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme is keeping an eye on space hazards, including disruptive space weather, debris objects in Earth orbit and asteroids that pass close enough to cause concern.

The asteroids – known as 'near-Earth objects', or NEOs, since they cross Earth's orbit – are a particular problem. Any attempt to survey and catalogue hazardous asteroids faces a number of difficulties. They're often jet black or at least very dark, they can approach rather too close before anyone sees them, and they're often spotted only once and then disappear before the discovery can be confirmed.

So ESA is turning to amateur astronomers to 'crowdsource' observations as part of Europe's contribution to the global asteroid hunt. These efforts will add to the follow-up observations already done at ESA's own telescope on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

This month, the UK's Faulkes Telescope Project will become the latest team to formally support the SSA programme. Spain's La Sagra Sky Survey, operated by the Observatorio Astronomico de Mallorca, began helping SSA earlier this year.

“The wider astronomy community offers a wealth of expertise and enthusiasm, and they have the time and patience to verify new sightings; this helps tremendously,” said Detlef Koschny, Head of NEO activity at ESA's SSA programme office.

“In return, we share observing time at ESA's own Optical Ground Station in Tenerife and provide advice, support and professional validation. We'll assist them in any way we can.”

The Faulkes Telescope Project runs both educational and research programmes, based at the University of Glamorgan in the UK. The project has a strong record in public education and science outreach, and is a partner of the US-based Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope network, which owns and operates two telescopes. Faulkes supports hundreds of schools across Europe.

“Our new cooperation with ESA is a great opportunity. Use of the 2 m-diameter telescopes in Hawaii and Siding Spring, Australia, will greatly enhance asteroid-spotting for the SSA programme, enabling fainter object detection and tracking from a global telescope network,” said Nick Howes, Pro-Am Programme Manager at the Faulkes Telescope.

“For European students, collaborating on exciting ESA activities and possibly detecting new NEOs is very appealing, as it's engagement with one of the world's great space agencies doing critical scientific work.”

ESA's SSA programme is developing services and infrastructure to enable Europe to observe NEOs, predict their orbits, produce impact warnings and be involved in possible mitigation measures and civil response.

It will also provide services to monitor man-made debris objects in orbit that can pose hazards to satellites and to monitor the effects of space weather phenomena on space and ground assets.

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A partnership with the UK’s Faulkes Telescope Project promises to boost the Agency’s space hazards research while helping students to discover potentially dangerous space rocks. ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme is keeping watch over space hazards, including disruptive space weather, debris objects in Earth orbit and asteroids that pass close enough to cause concern.

The asteroids – known as ‘near-Earth objects’, or NEOs, since they cross Earth’s orbit – are a particular problem. Any attempt to survey and catalogue hazardous asteroids faces a number of difficulties. They’re often jet black or at least very dark, they can approach rather too close before anyone sees them, and they’re often spotted only once and then disappear before the discovery can be confirmed.

Crowdsourcing the astronomy community
So ESA is turning to amateur astronomers to ‘crowdsource’ observations as part of Europe’s contribution to the global asteroid hunt. These efforts will add to the follow-up observations already done at ESA’s own telescope on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This month, the UK’s Faulkes Telescope Project will become the latest team to formally support the SSA programme. Spain’s La Sagra Sky Survey, operated by the Observatorio Astronomico de Mallorca, began helping SSA earlier this year.

Sharing expertise and observing time
“The wider astronomy community offers a wealth of expertise and enthusiasm, and they have the time and patience to verify new sightings; this helps tremendously,” says Detlef Koschny, Head of NEO activity at ESA’s SSA programme office.

“In return, we share observing time at ESA’s own Optical Ground Station in Tenerife and provide advice, support and professional validation. We’ll assist them in any way we can.”The Faulkes Telescope Project runs both educational and research programmes, based at the University of Glamorgan in the UK.

Public education and outreach
The project has a strong record in public education and science outreach, and is a partner of the US-based Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope network, which owns and operates two telescopes. Faulkes supports hundreds of schools across Europe.

“Our new cooperation with ESA is a great opportunity. Use of the 2 m-diameter telescopes in Hawaii and Siding Spring, Australia, will greatly enhance asteroid-spotting for the SSA programme, enabling fainter object detection and tracking from a global telescope network,” says Nick Howes, Pro-Am Programme Manager at the Faulkes Telescope.

“For European students, collaborating on exciting ESA activities and possibly detecting new NEOs is very appealing, as it’s engagement with one of the world’s great space agencies doing critical scientific work.”

ESA’s SSA programme is developing services and infrastructure to enable Europe to observe NEOs, predict their orbits, produce impact warnings and be involved in possible mitigation measures and civil response.

It will also provide services to monitor man-made debris objects in orbit that can pose hazards to satellites and to monitor the effects of space weather phenomena on space and ground assets.

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A ball of some of the oldest stars in the universe looks like a swarm of bees in a new view from an observatory in Chile. The photo, released today (May 9), was taken by a European Southern Observatory telescope and shows 100,000 stars crowded together in Messier 55, a globular star cluster located roughly 17,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius (The Archer). It is one of about 160 globular clusters orbiting the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy.

Scientists suspect the stars in globular clusters formed from single clouds of gas that condensed to make stars around the same time, around 10 billion years ago. That makes these stars some of the most ancient known. As such, they provide valuable archaeological evidence about what the universe was like not long after the Big Bang is thought to have given rise to it.

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On Saturday at 11:35 p.m. ET, the moon will officially turn full. And only 25 minutes later, the moon will also arrive at perigee, its closest approach to Earth — a distance of 221,802 miles (356,955 kilometers) away. The effect of this coincidence is a stunning skywatching sight called the " supermoon."

In fact, this month's perigee is the closest of any perigee in 2012 (they vary by about 3 percent, because the moon's orbit is not perfectly circular). The result will be a 16 percent brighter-than-average full moon accompanied by unusually high and low tides this weekend and into the new week. In contrast, later this year, on Nov. 28, the full moon will closely coincide with apogee, the moon's farthest point from Earth. 

Spring tides
Every month, "spring" tides occur when the moon is full and new. The word "spring," in this case, is derived from the German springen, to "spring up," and is not — as is often mistaken — a reference to the spring season. At these times the moon and sun form a line with Earth, so their tidal effects add together.  The sun, because of its distance, exerts a little less than half the tidal force of the moon. "Neap" tides, on the other hand, occur at those times when the moon is at first and last quarter and work at cross-purposes with the sun. At these times, tides are weak.

Tidal force varies as the inverse cube of an object's distance. During the supermoon on Saturday, the moon will be 12.2 percent closer at perigee than it will be two weeks later at apogee, which will nearly coincide with a new moon.  Therefore it will exert 42 percent more tidal force during this weekend's spring tides than during the spring tides near apogee two weeks later.

Although a full moon theoretically lasts just a moment, that moment is imperceptible to ordinary observation, and for a day or so before and after most will speak of seeing the nearly full moon as "full." The shaded strip is so narrow, and changing in apparent width so slowly, that it is hard for the naked eye to tell whether it is present or on which side it is.

And while this weekend's moon will be — as the Observer's Handbook of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada suggests on page 101 — the "largest full moon of 2012," the variation of the moon's distance is not readily apparent to observers viewing the moon directly.
Or is it?

Moon illusion
When the perigee moon lies close to the horizon it can appear absolutely enormous. That is when the famous "moon illusion" combines with reality to produce a truly stunning view. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, a low-hanging moon looks incredibly large when hovering near to trees, buildings and other foreground objects. The fact that the moon will be much closer than usual this weekend will only serve to amplify this strange effect.

So, a perigee moon, either rising in the east at sunset or dropping down in the west at sunrise, might seem to make the moon appear so close it almost seems that you could touch it. You can check out this effect for yourself by first noting the times for moonrise and moonset in your area here.

And one final note: Saturday also marks the midpoint of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. The exact moment between the March equinox and the June solstice occurs at 10:11 a.m. ET May 5. This spring's big full moon seemingly places an exclamation point on this seasonal benchmark. Traditionally, the full moon of May is known as the "Flower Moon" since flowers are now abundant most everywhere. It is also known as the Full Corn Planting Moon or the Milk Moon.
Happy moon watching!

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ARIES (March 21-April 19): On the one hand, you’re facing a sticky dilemma that you may never be able to change no matter how hard you try. On the other hand, you are engaged with an interesting challenge that may very well be possible to resolve. Do you know which is which? Now would be an excellent time to make sure you do. It would be foolish to keep working on untying a hopelessly twisted knot when there is another puzzle that will respond to your love and intelligence. Go where you’re wanted.?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): From an astrological perspective, it’s the New Year season; you’re beginning a fresh cycle. How would you like to celebrate? You could make a few resolutions – maybe pledge to wean yourself from a wasteful habit or self-sabotaging vice. You could also invite the universe to show you what you don’t even realize you need to know. What might also be interesting would be to compose a list of the good habits you will promise to cultivate, and the ingenious breakthroughs you will work toward, and the shiny yet gritty dreams you will court and woo.?

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): “My father-in-law was convinced that his sheepdogs picked up his thoughts telepathically,” writes Richard Webster in his article “Psychic Animals. “He needed only to think what he wanted his dogs to do, and they would immediately do it. He had to be careful not to think too far ahead, as his dogs would act on the thought he was thinking at the time.” To this I’d add that there is a wealth of other anecdotal evidence, as well as some scientific research, suggesting that dogs respond to unspoken commands. I happen to believe that the human animal is also capable of picking up thoughts that aren’t said aloud. And I suspect that you’re in a phase when it will be especially important to take that into account. Be discerning about what you imagine, because it could end up in the mind of someone you know!?

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Your right brain and left brain have rarely been on such close speaking terms as they are right now. Your genitals and your heart seem to be in a good collaborative groove as well. Even your past and your future are mostly in agreement about how you should proceed in the present. To what do we owe the pleasure of this rather dramatic movement toward integration? Here’s one theory: You’re being rewarded for the hard work you have done to take good care of yourself.?

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): A South African biologist was intrigued to discover an interesting fact about the rodent known as the elephant shrew: It much prefers to slurp the nectar of pagoda lilies than to nibble on peanut butter mixed with apples and rolled oats. The biologist didn’t investigate whether mountain goats would rather eat grasses and rushes than ice cream sundaes or whether lions like fresh-killed antelopes better than Caesar salad, but I’m pretty sure they do. In a related subject, Leo, I hope that in the coming weeks you will seek to feed yourself exclusively with the images, sounds, stories, and food that truly satisfy your primal hunger rather than the stuff that other people like or think you should like.?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): There are only a very few people whose ancestors were not immigrants. They live in Africa, where homo sapiens got its start. As for the rest of us, our forbears wandered away from their original home and spread out over the rest of the planet. We all came from somewhere else! This is true on many other levels, as well. In accordance with the astrological omens, I invite you Virgos to get in touch with your inner immigrant this week. It’s an excellent time to acknowledge and celebrate the fact that you are nowhere near where you started from, whether you gauge that psychologically, spiritually, or literally.?

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “When I’m good, I’m very good,” said Hollywood’s original siren, Mae West, “but when I’m bad I’m better.” I think that assertion might at times make sense coming out of your lips in the next two weeks. But I’d like to offer a variation that could also serve you well. It’s articulated by my reader Sarah Edelman, who says, “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m batty, I’m better.” Consider trying out both of these attitudes, Libra, as you navigate your way through the mysterious and sometimes unruly fun that’s headed your way.?

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): The Weekly World News, my favorite source of fake news, reported on a major development in the art world: An archaeologist found the lost arms of the famous Venus de Milo statue. They were languishing in a cellar in Southern Croatia. Hallelujah! Since her discovery in 1820, the goddess of love and beauty has been incomplete. Will the Louvre Museum in Paris, where she is displayed, allow her to be joined by her original appendages and made whole again? Let’s not concern ourselves now with that question. Instead, please turn your attention to a more immediate concern: the strong possibility that you will soon experience a comparable development, the rediscovery of and reunification with a missing part of you.?

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Seventeenth-century physicians sometimes advised their patients to consume tobacco as a way to alleviate a number of different maladies, from toothaches to arthritis. A few doctors continued recommending cigarettes as health aids into the 1950s. This bit of history may be useful to keep in mind, Sagittarius. You’re in a phase when you’re likely to have success in hunting down remedies for complaints of both a physical and psychological nature. But you should be cautious about relying on conventional wisdom, just in case some of it resembles the idea that cigarettes are good for you. And always double check to make sure that the cures aren’t worse than what they are supposed to fix.?

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Outer space isn’t really that far away. As astronomer Fred Hoyle used to say, you’d get there in an hour if you could drive a car straight up. I think there’s a comparable situation in your own life, Capricorn. You’ve got an inflated notion of how distant a certain goal is, and that’s inhibiting you from getting totally serious about achieving it. I’m not saying that the destination would be a breeze to get to. My point is that it’s closer than it seems.?

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): When most Westerners hear the word “milk,” they surmise it has something to do with cows. But the fact is that humans drink milk collected from sheep, goats, camels, yaks, mares, llamas, and reindeer. And many grocery stores now stock milk made from soybeans, rice, almonds, coconut, hemp, and oats. I’m wondering if maybe it’s a good time for you to initiate a comparable diversification, Aquarius. You shouldn’t necessarily give up the primal sources of nourishment you have been depending on. Just consider the possibility that it might be fun and healthy for you to seek sustenance from some unconventional or unexpected sources.?

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You wouldn’t want to play a game of darts with an inflatable dartboard, right? If you were a smoker, you’d have little interest in a fireproof cigarette. And while a mesh umbrella might look stylish, you wouldn’t be foolish enough to expect it to keep the rain out. In the spirit of these truisms, Pisces, I suggest you closely examine any strategy you’re considering to see if it has a built-in contradiction. Certain ideas being presented to you – perhaps even arising from your own subconscious mind­ – may be inherently impractical to use in the real world.

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Astronomers have for the very first time captured a supermassive black hole devouring a wandering star that strayed too close to a phenomena that nothing can escape, not even light.

Although the star most likely met its demise in an untimely fashion, it is an extraordinary event for science and astronomy, as scientists believe it may provide them with greater clues on the inner workings of dark behemoths nestled away in the hearts of many galaxies.

Supermassive black holes are objects millions and perhaps billions of times the mass of our sun. They lay quietly in the darkness awaiting for unlikely victims, such as stars, to happen by and then shred them apart with their extraordinarily powerful gravitational pull.

While scientists first caught a black hole performing stellar homicide last year, this is the first time they have been able to identify the victim. Using a wide selection of ground- and space-based telescopes, astronomers, led by Suvi Gezari of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, have identified the victim as a star rich in helium gas.

NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), a space-based observatory, and the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on the summit of Haleakala in Hawaii, were among the first to help identify the stellar remains.

“This is the first time we’ve actually been able to pinpoint what kind of star was disrupted,” Results of the discovery are published in today’s online edition of the journal Nature (PDF document).

The researchers, in June 2010, spotted a bright flare from the previously dormant black hole at the center of a galaxy 2.7 billion light years away.

“When the star is ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the black hole, some part of the star’s remains falls into the black hole while the rest is ejected at high speeds,” Gezari said. “We are seeing the glow from the stellar gas falling into the black hole over time.”

This particular black hole’s mass is estimated to be equivalent to 3 million suns, roughly the size of the black hole sitting at the center of the Milky Way.

“These spectacular events provide a glimpse into otherwise unobservable black holes, telling us about their masses,” Gezari said. “We know that there are strong connections between black holes and the galaxies they reside in, and it turns out that somehow the mass of the black hole and the mass of a galaxy influence each other, so we want to better know what’s going on there.”

“Also, people want to understand the physics of black holes and how they affect the geometry of space-time around them,” she added. “We need to know its mass to help pinpoint a lot of those details.”

The observations astronomers made give insights about the harsh environment around black holes and the types of stars swirling around them. The team believes the star’s hydrogen-filled envelope surrounding the core was lifted off a long time ago by the same black hole. The star may have been near the end of its life. After most of its hydrogen fuel was consumed, it most likely ballooned in size, becoming a red giant. It may have been circling the black hole in a highly elliptical orbit, similar to the elongated orbit comets have. Then, on one of its close passes, the black hole made its move, stripping the star’s puffed-up atmosphere with its extremely powerful gravity. The stellar remains continued its journey around the center, until it ventured even closer to the black hole to face its ultimate demise.

Astronomers predict there are stripped stars circling the black hole of our Milky Way as well. They believe these close encounters are rare, only occurring about once every hundred thousand years.

Gezari said her team was looking for a bright flare in ultraviolet light from the nucleus of a galaxy with a previously dormant black hole. Telescopes picked up one of those bright flares in June 2010. Astronomers continued to monitor the flare as it reached peak brightness a month later and then slowly faded during the next 12 months. They compared the brightening event to that of an explosive energy unleashed by a supernova, although the rise to the peak was much slower in this instance, taking nearly 45 days.

“The longer the event lasted, the more excited we got, because we realized this is either a very unusual supernova or an entirely different type of event, such as a star being ripped apart by a black hole,” said team member Armin Rest of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

In addition, Gezari and her colleagues analyzed the spectrum of the ejected gas using data from the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona. Since each element has a unique spectral fingerprint, we were able to determine the spectrum of the gas in this event was mostly helium.

“It is like we are gathering evidence from a crime scene,”The fact there was mostly helium and very little hydrogen in the gas suggests “the slaughtered star had to have been the helium-rich core of a stripped star,” she explained.

To completely rule out the possibility of an active nucleus flaring up in the galaxy, the team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the hot gas. Chandra showed that the characteristics of the gas didn’t match those from an active galactic nucleus.

“This is the first time where we have so many pieces of evidence, and now we can put them all together to weigh the perpetrator — the black hole — and determine the identity of the unlucky star that fell victim to it,” said Gezari. “These observations also give us clues to what evidence to look for in the future to find this type of event.”

The team plans to use the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, to be completed sometime in 2015, to scan half the sky every night, hoping to detect far more carnage.

“We can measure at what rate stars are being disrupted by black holes as a function of the type of galaxy, measure the masses of the black holes, see what types of stars orbit black holes in the centers of galaxies, and try and better understand the evolution of galaxies over time,” said Gezari.

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Astronomy Buddy is an iPhone or iPad app that describe itself as “the ultimate tool” for learning about astronomy as well as a helper for teachers. It includes lessons, quizzes, news feeds, astronomy videos and maps to the major observatories. However, the visual presentation and depth of explanatory material are not well matched.

The Home Page
The home page is a graphic with text in purple instead of black. There is a list of major sections, but no preference in the app or in iOS Settings. That means that there’s no way to turn off the beep every time you touch a section. Also, the Next button on the upper right of the home page doesn’t do anything.

Astronomy Lessons
An obvious first place to look is the “Astronomy Lessons,” marked with a film icon, but the lessons are all text and static graphics. I started by looking at the chapter “The Sky,” and the first thing that I noticed in the discussion of stellar magnitudes was the fact that exponents are not raised. So for example, instead of 2.5125 = 100, the text shows (2.512)5 = 100. That looks like a multiplication. Throughout the app, I could not find any place where the exponents were raised, leading to expressions in chapter 6, “Light and Telescopes,” such as “c = 300,000 km/s = 3*108 m/s.”

 

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The theory of dark matter has taken another knock, with the discovery of a vast structure of satellite galaxies and clusters of stars surrounding our galaxy, stretching out across a million light years. The finding challenges the idea that a large percentage of our universe consists of dark matter, which can't be seen. This theory's already taken a bit of a bashing this week, after scientists announced that there's no dark matter anywhere near our sun.

University of Bonn scientists used a range of sources, from twentieth century photographic plates to images from the robotic telescope of the Sloan Deep Sky Survey to assemble a full picture. "Once we had completed our analysis, a new picture of our cosmic neighbourhood emerged," says PhD student Marcel Pawlowski.

The team found a vast quantity of objects, distributed in a plane at right angles to the galactic disk. The newly-discovered structure is huge, extending from as close as 33,000 light years to as far away as one million light years from the centre of the galaxy.

As the different companions move around the Milky Way, they lose material, stars and sometimes gas, which forms long streams along their paths. The new results show that this lost material is aligned with the plane of galaxies and clusters too.

"This illustrates that the objects are not only situated within this plane right now, but that they move within it," says Pawlowski. "The structure is stable."But these observations can't be explained of theories of dark matter are correct. "In the standard theories, the satellite galaxies would have formed as individual objects before being captured by the Milky Way," says team member Pavel Kroupa.

"As they would have come from many directions, it is next to impossible for them to end up distributed in such a thin plane structure."The scientists believe that the satellite galaxies and clusters must have formed together in a collision of two galaxies.

"The other galaxy lost part of its material, material that then formed our galaxy’s satellite galaxies and the younger globular clusters and the bulge at the galactic centre," says Pawlowski. "The companions we see today are the debris of this 11 billion year old collision." Kroupa points out that this model appears to rule out the presence of dark matter in the universe - threatening a central pillar of current cosmological theory.

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Captain Anthony Cudjoe (rtd), Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE), on Saturday launched two astrology books in Arabic authored by the Western Regional Chief Imam, Sheikh Ostaz Ali Hassan Ali, at Takoradi. The MCE performed the launch on behalf of the Vice President John Dramani Mahama.

In a speech, Captain Cudjoe commended the Chief Imam for writing the books to improve the knowledge of Muslims in particular, and the general public on the subject of astrology. He expressed the hope that the books would help people to have better understanding of the world and reality to enable them to make appreciable contribution towards national development.

Captain Cudjoe spoke of the importance of astrology as a science and of the valuable contributions of Islam towards civilization. Paapa Owusu Ankomah, Member of Parliament for Sekondi, said education was an important tool for development and that the books would promote better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.

"The books would encourage readers to have faith in themselves and in God", he added. Sheikh Ali said, he wrote the books "The knowledge of astrology for beginners" and "Gladtiders in knowledge of astrology" in response to the interests expressed by people in the subject. He said the knowledge of astrology is important in all spheres of life and that "It is incumbent upon all of us to revive its existence".**

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