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Magazine > Back Issues > 2002
Sky Almanac

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On the cover:
Dark, cold regions of star formation, known as Thackeray's Globules, stand out against a glowing cloud of gas in this Hubble Space Telescope image of IC 2944. Each cloud spans more than one light-year. Astronomers have found that the first major burst of star formation in the universe may have occurred much earlier than previously thought.

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March/April 2002
New technology and new ideas are keeping three classic ground-based telescopes in service decades after they first gazed skyward. StarDate's executive editor, Damond Benningfield, sheds some light on these Grand Old Telescopes of Texas and California.

March 2 is the 30th anniversary of the launch of NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which helped pave the road to the outer solar system for the Voyagers, Galileo, and Cassini. As freelance science writer Mark Wolverton explains in 30 and Counting, it's still leading the way today.

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