Editorial

Welcome to the February 2005 ATNF newsletter. It has been a pleasure to put together our first newsletter issue for the year; as usual we have reports covering a wide variety of subjects. Our thanks to all our contributors.

The discovery at Parkes of the first direct detection of stimulated emission in our Galaxy in the form of pulsed maser emission is reported by Joel Weisberg and forms our cover article in this issue. Read about the discovery of a hitherto unobserved phase in the life of a star in the act of forming its planetary nebula as described by Jessica Chapman on page 18. On page 10 Maxim Voronkov reports the discovery of new examples of the rare methanol maser line transitions at 104.3 GHz and 9.9 GHz.

The recent Huygens Probe tracking in which several ATNF telescopes played crucial roles provided much excitement and well deserved satisfaction at the flawless performance. We have two reports on the challenging Huygens experiments on pages 6 and 8.

On page 12, Neil Killeen provides an update on the multi-faceted work in progress for the Virtual Observatory project. Wayne Orchiston and Bruce Slee present a historical perspective with a review of the work of Alex Shain, one of the pioneers in Australian radio astronomy.

We have several other news and regular items where you will find useful information. We hope you enjoy this newsletter. We welcome your comments and suggestions. You can contact us at newsletter@atnf.csiro.au.

The ATNF newsletter is also available on the web at www.atnf.csiro.au/news/newsletter .

Lakshmi Saripalli, Jessica Chapman and Joanne Houldsworth
ATNF News Production Team
(newsletter@atnf.csiro.au)