Planetarium Software

I woke up earlier than I had to this morning, in an futile attempt to view a penumbral lunar eclipse. At the last minute, clouds moved in, making it a somewhat disappointing total lunar eclipse (by clouds).

However, in the process of researching the event, I came across two fascinating (and useful) astronomy resources. First, a site called Shadow and Substance, which highlights upcoming eclipse events (and more). And, from there, a free open source Planetarium program called Stellarium that blows away other programs I've seen, including commercial ones.

Stellarium has lots of options, a little overwhelming at first, but well worth the effort to setup. If you want to set Hood River as your default location, our latitude (in digital format) is 45.706 N, and longitude is 121.519 W. More or less. You can get closer to your actual location by searching on the internet.