a sad day

The McLaughlin Planetarium closed.



I had gone to a number of events there. I even had the event phone number in my palmtop.

It will be missed.

§

Wikipedia has a good write-up on the old planetarium.

portable stool

I realised one needs a short stool when observing with the SP-C8, in particular when looking at objects at zenith.

I found a handy collapsible wooden stool at Ikea. It folds flat so takes up very little space when stuffing in the trunk. It has a handle hole in the seat to help carry it. It is fairly lightweight.

RedShift 2.0 software

Using my first astronomy software, Redshift 2.0 from Maris. CD-ROM based, it works on both my PCs and Macs. I can use it at home and my Mom's.



I'm really enjoying using it, planning for events, printing reversed charts. I like the animated tours as well. Flying through space around the solar system is very cool.



It features:

• 250 000 stars, asteroids, and comets
• 40 000 deep sky objects
• 700 full-screen photographs of planets, nebulae, etc.
• seems to go down to magnitude 10...

One problem I'm having is that the software seems unable to find existing QuickTime software if installing onto a new computer. So, you have to let the RedShift install QuickTime. Then you can reinstall QuickTime after that.