Friday, November 30, 2012

Star Gazing

I'm not a star gazer.  All I see when I look up are a whole bunch of white dots.  Oh, I can find the big dipper, and so the little dipper and north star.  Sometimes I can even find the belt of Orion.

It's not that I'm not interested in the stars.  Like many cruisers, I like to sit on the deck on warm nights and star gaze.  I just have no idea what I'm seeing.  That's about to change.

I wrote about spending too much time online.  Since I retired, I have this new found need for knowledge.  I'll spend countless hours googling whatever pops into my head, or scanning my news feed in Facebook looking for a nugget of brilliance.  Yeah, I know.  It's pretty rare.

One of my Facebook friends posted a link about a free program called Stellarium that shows you the night sky and identifies stars and planets for you.  I downloaded it and configured it to my location in Brunswick, Georgia (with some difficulty).  Two nights ago, I got to see the stars even though it was overcast here and, looking out the window, I couldn't see squat.  Yesterday was partly cloudy, so I'd hoped to find the stars that were displayed on my laptop up in sky.

This was at 6 PM looking west.  Cool.  You can even see the twilight. Yes, it really looked like that, although the land scenery was a village in France or something.


Here is another shot, looking east at 7:22 PM last night.


That big bright thing is something called the "moon", with "Jupiter" above it at 1 o'clock.  I poked my head outside and there they were,

The other nice thing about Stellarium is that I can now star gaze without actually having to go outside.

If you'd like to download it, go to www.stellarium.org.  And to save you an hour of trying to find where to set your location, just hit the F6 key.

And finally, I can't stop laughing about this one.


Yeah, I found it on Facebook. So what.  It's still funny.  C'mon, I know you're smiling.  Maybe even laughing out loud, like I did.

So you're asking "So Dave, are you ever going to do something productive?  Anything?  We regular followers are thinking of banding together for an intervention.".  Well, today I need to go get some blood work done for my every three years annual physical, and then go to the Walmarts to pick up some meds, and then we'll see.  It's perfect painting weather here in Georgia, but Pam has today off from work.  I think we should spend quality time together and go to the movies to see "Lincoln" rather than me painting all alone.  I'll let you know tomorrow what we actually did.

Please root for the movies.  I have plenty of time for painting.  Here's our forecast...


5-Day Forecast for Brunswick, Georgia

Today: Partly Cloudy, High: 74 F, Low: 55 F

Tomorrow: Partly Cloudy, High: 74 F, Low: 55 F

Sunday: Partly Cloudy, High: 75 F, Low: 56 F

Monday: Partly Cloudy, High: 78 F, Low: 55 F

Tuesday: Partly Cloudy, High: 79 F, Low: 54 F

3 comments:

  1. Stargazing is a much more interesting activity than navel gazing! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Go Movies-- Go Movies!!
    Navel Gazing-- The activity of thinking too much or too deeply about yourself, your experiences, your feelings, etc.

    ReplyDelete