Thoughts From a Clicker
By Tiny Ruisch
By now, all members of the Cajun Clickers hopefully have had their electricity restored. Hurricane Ida did an excellent job of depriving us of many of our modern conveniences. For me, there was a benefit to help allay the lack of air conditioning. There wasn’t any light pollution. The night sky was clearly visible.
It seems that space and astronomy stories are in the news almost every day. Even if you discount the billionaires mucking things up, there are many exiting things happening. We have been exploring our solar system in depth, especially Mars. Deep space telescopes are finding many new planets orbiting distant stars. Scientists are speculating that many of them might even be habitable.
Now that we’re getting back to normal, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on a telescope to view the heavens. Planetarium software will allow you to view stars as if you were actually looking at the sky. All you need is a computer with a decent graphics card. There are several free planetarium software programs that can bring the skies to your monitor.
Stellarium is a free open source planetarium program that shows the sky in 3D. If you have a compatible telescope you can use the program to control it. The program runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS. There is also a portable version.
Celestia is a multi-platform Planetarium software available for free. It lets you explore the Solar System along with the vast expanses of the Universe. Celestia does not restrict you to view objects from Earth’s point of view. You can go to a planet, a star or galaxy to view it from a different perspective.
SkyChart is another open source cross platform program. It also will control a computerized telescope. There are many deep space images with more being frequently added to the data base.
C2A is a freeware program that has an excellent data section next to the sky image display. The program is very intuitive and easy to use. It is available for Windows only.
WorldWideTelescope has an interesting “Guided Tours” feature. Each of the tours takes you on a multimedia trip through some aspect of the night sky. You can either download the program for windows or view in a web browser.
Although I’ve gotten older and don’t have a telescope any more, I still enjoy exploring the universe with these websites and programs. If you’re interested, give them a try.
Thanks for reading and keep on clicking.