Wednesday

January 04, 2012 #128 - Cartes du Ciel

I was checking for updates to my astronomy programs and found that my old standby Cartes du Ciel has been improved. Patrick Chevalley has issued version 3.5-svn1986M.





If you will check the site there is also a link to download recent data for use with this program having stars and info anywhere down to 20th. magnitude. This is still a free program! As I have said before it is astounding the amount of time and work that these great programers will undertake for the love of astronomy. Thank you Patrick and friends.

http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/start

Clear Sky - Rich

Tuesday

January 03, 2012 #127 - New Year, !Again!

Happy New Year

Another year has past! This poor blog has had little attention for many moons. As I have written in several posts my wife and I were traveling by camper throughout America during 2009/10 and early 2011. We had to slow to a holding pattern through most of last year due to family needs. We are now back on the shores of Lake Superior looking forward to the new year.

It was crisp (-2 below) last night and I spent some time admiring the winter skies. The moon was bright in the south with Jupiter traveling along nearby. The skies can be amazingly clear near the Apostle Islands no mater what time of year. I was hoping to be treated to the Aurora but the sun has not cooperated during this trip. There was  a great show in Indiana with lots of brilliant reds which I caught about a month ago.

As I have checked the statistics on blog usage by readers, and have found that my original posts of scanned telescope catalogs and information have been very popular since the first page was presented in July 2008. As a new years treat for those looking for more of this type of postings I am passing on an excellent site to go to for this type of info, a literal pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Classic Telescope / Catalogs and Manuals

http://geogdata.csun.edu/~voltaire/classics/

A very hearty thank you to this site and all who contributed for us to read!

Clear Sky - Rich