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The article reports that a malfunction--possibly a short circuit--developed in a 5-volt power supply that drives moving parts in the observatory's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the Hubble Space Telescope. Any hope of reviving the instrument would require a repair mission to the telescope. The other three scientific instruments on Hubble remain healthy. Despite the loss of STIS, Hubble "remains a marvelous observatory and a unique facility for learning about the universe," says John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. NASA is now considering whether it could fix STIS as part of a proposed robotic mission to repair and upgrade Hubble some 3 years from now. The agency's decision will depend on the determination of exactly what went wrong with the power supply and whether the robotic system now under study could handle the repair.

The article discusses the passing of Venus over the face of the sun for the first time in 122 years, as seen in the United States and Greece by professional and amateur skywatchers. Among the sky watchers in Nantucket, MA, was veteran astronomer Dorrit Hoffleit, former director of the island's Maria Mitchell Observatory. Cataracts now cloud Hoffleit's vision, but the transit loomed bright enough for Hoffleit to enjoy. At age 97, she was probably the oldest astronomer to view the event, yet even she was born 25 years too late to have viewed the planet's last such passage, in 1882. Astronomers in centuries past embarked on hazardous journeys around the globe to chase the transit of Venus. Observations of a transit of Venus in the 18th century provided the first evidence for an atmosphere of a planet other than Earth. Moreover, by comparing the times that Venus entered and exited the sun's disk at far-flung locations, scientists could calculate the planet's distance to the sun and thereby determine one of the era's most sought-after cosmic details: the size of the solar system. INSET: Island Astronomy.

Reports on an image of sky near the constellation Sextans which appears to be empty but really contains numerous extremely faint and remote galaxies. How the image was taken by the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope in Chile; Process that was used to obtain the image; What the image shows.