TIN PRICES FALL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27580, 23 December 1950, Page 3

TIN PRICES FALL

LONDON, Dec. 21. Today’s tin prices are: Spot, £l2lO (£1272 10s); forward, £1075 (£lll7 10s).

MAPPING OF HEAVENS A 23-year sky-mapping project involving 500,000 measurements of positions of stars has been completed at Yale University in the United States. More than 128,000 stars in an area covering half the sky was catalogued. Stars measured included those of the ninth magnitude. These are 25 times more faint than the faintest star visible to the naked eye. Star positions were computed from a series of photographic plates, most of which were made at an observation station maintained jointly by Yale and Columbia Universities at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Four measurements were* made of each star to determine its right ascension and declination —a measurement corresponding to geographic latitude and longitude. The star measurements were computed in a fraction of a second by large electric computing machines. This reduced by several years the time necessary for making the computations.

While the Yale project mapped the stars in half the heavens, the remainder are being catalogued by observatories in England and in South. Africa. The only similar celestial mapping project was undertaken cooperatively by 14 observatories 60 years ago.

The Post Office overseas radio-telephone exchange is now open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sundays for telephone calls to Australian subscribers. This special Sunday service is being much used.