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Stars and Sites
Apr. 16th, 2006 06:15 pmAfter finding a way to compute Universal Time from CDT and visa versa, and finding my latitude and longitude, I went back to Your Sky to search out my mysterious star. With some fiddling around (oooh! Horizon controls!) I have determined that it's none other than Venus. Yay!
If you have any interest in the sky at all, Your Sky is a site to make friends with. It's got lots of things to play with, it didn't seem too hard to figure out how to make it do what you wanted, and it computes the location of astronomical objects for any time day or night, so you can figure out where to look if you want to find Venus after sunrise. (Evidently it's possible under some circumstances, so I'm now ready to try it.)
In exploring it, I discovered that it was a section of a site called Fourmilab, which is maintained by John Walker, one of the authors of AutoCAD. Fourmilab is the kind of site I would run if I had the time and patience to run a personal website--it's got the recipe for a reverse-engineered blue cheese salad dressing, directions on how to rewire your Christmas lights with LEDs, a variety of classic SF novels for downloading, an array of free computer utilities (I'm thinking of getting the Crater Screen saver for my home computer, because "What better way to protect your monitor's phosphor than by smashing rocks into it at dozens of kilometres per second?") and more. Just go look; you'll see what I mean.
If you have any interest in the sky at all, Your Sky is a site to make friends with. It's got lots of things to play with, it didn't seem too hard to figure out how to make it do what you wanted, and it computes the location of astronomical objects for any time day or night, so you can figure out where to look if you want to find Venus after sunrise. (Evidently it's possible under some circumstances, so I'm now ready to try it.)
In exploring it, I discovered that it was a section of a site called Fourmilab, which is maintained by John Walker, one of the authors of AutoCAD. Fourmilab is the kind of site I would run if I had the time and patience to run a personal website--it's got the recipe for a reverse-engineered blue cheese salad dressing, directions on how to rewire your Christmas lights with LEDs, a variety of classic SF novels for downloading, an array of free computer utilities (I'm thinking of getting the Crater Screen saver for my home computer, because "What better way to protect your monitor's phosphor than by smashing rocks into it at dozens of kilometres per second?") and more. Just go look; you'll see what I mean.
