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Less accurate than compass or North Star. Put your watch next to a thin stick so the shadow falls over its center and the hour hand points along the shadow towards the stick. A line dividing the angle made by the shadow and the watch's 12 (1 if Daylight Savings Time) points South. At 6 a m the sun is East. Face the sun, South is to your right. At 6 p m the sun is West, South to your left. Or draw a circle with lines for the hour hand and 12 or 1.

A true storm with 2,200 shooting stars an hour in prime viewing areas peaked within 20 minutes of the time predicted, giving scientists new confidence in their ability to forecast this elusive phenomenon. Leonids occur yearly when Earth glides through dust and pebbles from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Coming from constellation Leo they're sparse. Every 33 years Earth enters an especially dense debris stream. Some meteors had long trails. Comet debris forming meteors may share the early solar system's primitive composition.

A new, strange, distant big 10th planet far beyond Pluto, a hitchhiker joined the solar system later than the other planets. Maybe it's a burned out mini-star, a brown dwarf, our sun's long lost twin 3 trillion miles away. It's still part of our solar system, maybe 3 times as big as Jupiter, big enough to warp far-traveling comets' orbits. The object, informally named the perturber, is so distant and dark telescopes only see its gravitational push-pull on 3 dozen comets. It's not unusual to see a planet's effects before seeing the planet, as before Pluto was first observed. Paths of 13 comets whose huge orbits bring them into this part of the solar system once every few million years or so show a similar distorting pull, warping in 1/4 of 82 other comets generating from the Oort Cloud, a comet breeding ground far past Pluto.

BROWN DWARF formed not like a planet but like a star. When the solar system formed there were 2 stars: the Sun and a small twin which shrank and cooled, observable in infrared. Something orbiting a sun is a planet unless it glows. A planet moved into the solar system after the solar system formed. It's long suspected something warps comets' paths, everything from theoretical anti-sun Nemesis to passing stars. Many doubt a 10th planet or a brown dwarf without enough comets to see this as evidence. A NASA IR telescope should find the object's inner heat and confirm its existence.

Large planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune formed within a relatively narrow band around the sun, scattered by interplanetary jostling. All 9 solar system planets maybe formed as icy bits of rock merged with gas, swirling around the newborn sun 5 billion years ago. How could Uranus and Neptune form at their current distance from the sun? In theory there wasn't enough dust and gas out there. 4 - 5 planet cores could have formed where Jupiter and Saturn are today. Big planet cores forming trigger other large ones to clump together as well.

4 new moons found around Saturn. Total 22 known moons. A telescope device amplifying light helped astronomers spot faint pinpoints of light orbiting off Saturn. The new moons, based on reflected light, are 6 - 30 miles in diameter, seen only as faint dots of light moving around Saturn. Uranus has 21 known moons.

ASTROBIOLOGY Future space missions include

NEWBORN PLANETS: A giant infrared space telescope, SIRTF, launched Jan 2004, detecting disks of dust and gas around other stars, where new planets are born. A gap in such a disk, like a hole in a doughnut, shows a planet is there. E g a disk around bright southern star Fomelhaut.

EARTH-SIZE PLANETS: Space Interferometry Mission, launching in 2009, 3 synchronized telescopes trailing Earth as it revolves around the sun, surveying 200 nearby stars looking for Earth-size planets. About 100 extrasolar planets already were discovered but they're too big and hot to be considered habitable.

MARS LIFE: Mars landers and orbiters launched every other year starting 2003 to scout Mars for biological activity. Collecting Martian rock and soil samples to return to Earth is planned for 2011 or 2013.

EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE: Terrestrial Planet Finder, an even more powerful space telescope still being designed, planned for launch by 2015 to investigate 50 extrasolar planets where conditions might make life possible. It will pick 10 of these for closer study, looking for primitive life.

Asteroid discovered inside Earth's orbit

An asteroid inside Earth's orbit rockets around the sun once every 184 days, the quickest trip of any known solar system object. 2004 JG6 visible early evening during a brief window of time when objects close to the sun are visible. The asteroid will also be relatively visible just after sunrise in autumn. They're only lit behind. In daytime they're seen as a tiny crescent. Looking outward away from the sun objects are always lit. Part of a nationwide search for asteroids and comets that could collide with Earth. It's no danger to us, at least not for the next 10,000 years. Based on its distance from Earth and how much light it reflects the asteroid is estimated as 3/10 and 6/10 mile diameter, moving 67,000 mph. Earth moves through space at about 40,000 mph.