Okay, this is not just for you, but so I won't forget about it.  NASA has put together a guide for learning about the moon.  Looking for something to occupy your kids (ahem, that applies whether you are a teacher or a parent), then this might be interesting.

Not that you're likely to notice.  For the most part, accessing web pages is limited by my DSL upload speed which is merely 768k.  Funny how things change.  Remember when 1/2 a T1 connection was considered fast?  Hard to believe the work "merely" can go in the same sentence.

Well, okay, I made that up.  But the first two weeks of October, say Oct 4-17 will be a great time to be up early to view Saturn, Mercury, and Venus as they dance around the early morning sky during the morning twilight.  Saturn will actually be the faintest of the bunch.  On Oct 16, the crescent moon will have joined the fray and there will be a nice visual grouping of the three planets with the moon.

This annual event is sponsored by the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York in conjunction with the Urban Park Rangers.  Stargazing in Central Park's Sheep Meadow will be hosted by numerous amateur astronomers (and their telescopes!).  More details are available at the announcement page at the AAANY web site: http://www.aaa.org/index.aspx?LOBID=952

If you are New York City, this weekend is the annual Urban Starfest held in Sheep Meadow (Central Park).

I had a rather long outage due to a botched upgrade from which I am still recovering.  I had planned on upgrading from Fedora 8, to 9, then 10, and finally 11.  You have to upgrade incrementally, but the first step failed part way through after having started installing packages.  An attempt to retry crashed even earlier.  At that point, I decided to try a clean install of Fedora 11 while preserving my data partitions then recover configuration files from backup.  That failed, too.  Sigh. 

While at the Summer Star Party, after taking all those frames of the double cluster, I decided to try M45, the Pleiades.

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