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Pocket Universe For the iPhone
I love laying outside and staring at the stars. It’s amazing how small we are, and how minor our problems are when you look at the size of the universe. I use to be real good at spotting a bunch of different constellations. I forgot most of them now. I pretty much can only find Ursa Major in the summer and Orion in the winter.
Yesterday I discovered the iPhone app Pocket Universe. It’s pretty much a pocket planetarium, and very cool. It uses your location, time, and date to show you what the sky should look like. For the iPhone 3GS, is uses the compass feature and even adjusts based on what direction you are facing. In town where I am at, it’s hard to see many stars. There is just too much light pollution. At the end of the month we are heading to the lakes camping. I can’t wait to put this app to work then. It will be cool to be able to locate planets, and constellations, and other objects in the solar system.
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Astronomy
I have always been intrigued by astronomy. Of course there was no astronomy teaching in my high school. I took one astronomy course in college and loved it. One of my favorite blogs is BadAstronomy.com. I have been reading that blog for quite some time, and learn something every day from Phil Plait. His video chats are really good. He has great ways of explaining really complex things. Lately he has been answering questions from high schoolers, and while his answers are geared toward high schoolers, really anybody can learn from them. I don’t think the average person knows much about astronomy. Astronomy is one of the sciences that gets ignored, or at least it did in my school. Thanks to the internet, and the Bad Astronomer I can learn all I want about astronomy.