Now, if it would just STOP SNOWING!!

In typical but always-surprising-to-me fashion, it's snowing in Central Oregon. There is about an inch of snow left over from yesterday, and it's snowing 'as we speak'. Despite my tendency to complain about it, the variety of meterological experiences is one of the main things I love about living in this area. Of course, that means all of the astronomy projects are on hold, but that's OK. That's just good time to study or work on some projects.

My spring double star tour is all set up, but maybe I'll go ahead and add to it. I only have about 60 stars in it right now, taken from a couple of different sources. I may as well expand it. The other thing I'm doing is plotting everything out on 'The Sky'. Sky by Bisque is nice software, but far too expensive for what it offers. I purchased the Serious Astronomer edition for $100 if I remember correctly, and still have to manually go in and create a viewing list. That's a bit cheap on their part not to offer that rather important feature. In any case, there is a way to enter the RA, DEC and name of each object and plot it out on a sky chart.

Maybe one of my next projects will be to review several of the free or shareware astronomy software programs on line. In hindsight, once of these programs would have been just fine, and I would have an extra $100 to spend on astronomy accessories.