After so many nights looking up at the gorgeous night sky, and being unable to take a decent picture for my blog (or my desktop), I came across this widget:


Astronomy Widget

I've installed this widget, and it's pretty fantastic! You can customize it for your location, even which direction you want to look toward (N/S/E/W)

For you PC users (the widget is Mac-only), there's a web version:

Starry Night Online (Beta)

You personalize the view via zip code, or, for the more technically minded, with latitude and longitude. It will even label stars, planets, and constellations! Pretty cool and far out!! Enjoy!!

I was outside the other night, and the sky was absolutely full of stars...

big ones,
little ones,
bright ones,
and faint ones that you had to look carefully to see.

I grabbed my camera to take a picture of it for you, but my camera isn't sophisticated enough to take a good picture (although, it may be the photographer :->), so I went on the Web to look for a good picture of a star-filled, night sky. Here's one that spoke to me:



Here's the link for the caption that went with this photo:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071020.html

In reading that caption, I learned a lot about why you don't see most of the stars when you live in the city.

To quote: "City dwellers have already lost most of the constellations, the planet Saturn, and a host of medium magnitude stars. They can forget about observing most meteor showers, too, or faint displays of Northern Lights.

It's a big loss. Young sky watchers grow up to be philosophers, scientists, poets, explorers, and school teachers. But kids aren't likely to watch -- or be inspired by -- a blank sky."

To learn more about this, check out: the International Dark-sky Association website: http://www.darksky.org.