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Monday, August 08, 2005

 
3:50 PM: monday, monday [#] [0]

we had a neat artist's way reunion breakfast @ colleen's this morning, then got our hair cut, then stopped by the hollywood library because rob told me about a portrait of edward gorey in its coffeeshop -- and there was, but i found something even more interesting: a gilded laptop! a woman had wrapped her entire powerbook in flash copper leaf. it was amazing, but boy, i don't think i could mess w/ a laptop that way. sven's looking for a theatre playing nochnoy dozor which should have been out by now & regal even had a "coming soon" poster for it, but we can't find it anywhere.

had a little relapse about amelia after looking at some pix on sven's camera. meh.

just in time for the perseids trip: i picked up a great ephemeris called stellarium, which is a little rough around the os x edges, but still a beautiful and useful piece of software. i've seen other astronomy software but this is by far the most impressive for simple observational astronomy purposes (and it's free!). thanks to stellarium, i can actually -find- perseus, which rises below cassieopia and above orion, and i was delighted to discover that this year mars rises with it.

because you can look at the sky at any time of day or night or months past and future, stellarium immediately solved some questions sven & i have been having since beginning our nightly explorations in january. for instance, we had wondered why gemini seemed to have an extra bright star not noted on the star chart which made it look like the "cell phone" costellation. we now know that extra star is saturn. michaelmas asked me to name a star over the river during fourth of july, and though i confidently thought it was spica, it turns out to be jupiter (but at least it's -near- spica. :). the brightest star hovering near sunset is venus. in conjunction with 365 starry nights, the whole sky seems friendlier now.