Some Lagniappe for You
by Tiny Ruisch
la·gniappe (lnyp, ln-yp)
n. Chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi
1. A small gift presented by a store owner to a customer with the customer’s purchase.
2. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. Also called regionally boot.
Last month there were a lot of astronomy stories. The eclipse that crossed the United States was on the news every day. This has been only the latest of many extra terrestrial stories in the recent past. Pluto was downgraded from planet status. 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.
Back here on Earth, 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.
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.
If you like these programs, just tell everyone that you’ve got a SWLAPCUG extra, a bonus perk, a small gift, a present from the club: a little lagniappe.