Editorial

Welcome to the October 2003 issue of the ATNF newsletter.

It is with pleasure that we bring out this newsletter, our last issue for the year. As before, we are very happy at the response to our call for article contributions. Our sincere thanks to all contributors.

We have a variety of items in this newsletter. This is our first issue with the new ATNF Director, Professor Brian Boyle, and we begin with a Director's message. The 12-mm system continues to impress with its high performance as can be seen from the two articles on pages 14 and 17. With the recently held IAU General Assembly in Sydney behind us and with a heavy involvement of the ATNF staff at various stages and levels, we planned to bring together, for this issue, summaries of events related to and around the time of the IAU GA. Thank you to all those who responded. An interesting and informative account of the work involved in conducting a meeting of this size is given on page 6. Exciting developments happening within the ATNF Engineering Group are summarized on page 11. Important changes to ATNF time assignment processes are given in the report on page 29.

As always we welcome contributions for the forthcoming issues. Our next newsletter will be the February 2004 issue. We are always pleased to receive comments and suggestions for the newsletter. Please contact us at (newsletter@atnf.csiro.au). A web version of the newsletter can be found at www.atnf.csiro.au/news /newsletter.

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