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  • Suggestions for items or topics or comments are much appreciated, please contact Brian
     
  • Be sure to also see Don Hladiuk's detailed Sky Highlights

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  • Linked items / Older Broken Links:
       Some sites delete older headlines items quite quickly. Since I have limited time to be online to verify and regularly unlink such items from the list, you will likely find various broken links the farther down the list you go. I chose to leave headlines up even when they are old so that you can at least get a feel for the past months unfolding. (In various cases, by entering key words from any "outdated" headlines here into Google or AltaVista or Yahoo for example you may sometimes find other sources of the story that are still online or at least background material.) Thanks for your understanding.
      Contents of external linked sites are beyond our control. If you encounter major ongoing problems through this list, however, do let me know, thanks.

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  • Caution with news items - Press releases should often be taken with a grain of salt; though I try to avoid articles written solely as filler or publicity, many online items about serious news can still be incomplete and may not indicate alternative theories, error statistics, actual stage of research, specific references, stellar coordinates, etc. Also some on-line captioning of photos is incompete - for example at times stories have included several-year-old photos mixed in with new but didn't clearly say so. Also remember, many color astrophotos in news stories use highly enhanced colours, sometimes validly but sometimes extrapolating excessively.
     
  • Q and A.Wondering why a very recent story you found elsewhere is not listed in the top part of the list? Answer: sometimes stories have appeared earlier - for example the one about the moon and a now-gone fifth planet which I listed about half a month earlier than its later reappearance on the web. Another answer: the same topic maybe has been listed under a quite different title from a different news source. Or under a revised headline that hopefully indicates story content more directly for purposes of a review list*. Yet another answer: mainly earth-focused space projects are not always listed in this mainly star-focused list. And: some items are mainly technical and on web sites specialists already know about (egs. faint occultations and asteroids, interplanetary magnetic field Bz direction and so forth.) (*brief excerpts are sometimes quoted in notes column to help clarify headline event. If largely paraphrased, single-quotemarks used.)

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  • "Abstracts"    These items are links to short technical abstracts (the related full documents usually require a password or subscription) that may be of interest because 1) they give a bit of a sampling of what goes on in astronomy research behind the public headlines - and why it is not easy! 2) they raise particularly interesting implications beyond just the technical world.
        Keep in mind that these abstracts normally relate to research in progress in any given area, and is not the final word! Indeed, other research efforts may sometimes turn up quite different interpretations or conclusions. All part of research, and useful to keep in mind when you read authoritative-sounding public headlines. As elsewhere in science, findings have to stand the test of scrutiny by other researchers - sometimes months or years later, too (think of Newton and Einstein...)
        These linked abstracts are selected by your calendar-master only when he has the time beyond gathering regular headlines (which is not often:-(, so their listing is not complete by any means; any tech items you want to suggest for the list, please do eMail me thanks)

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