USING "YOUR SKY" TO VIEW THE HEAVENS

By: Charles Bowen Science Reporters Get Their Own Virtual Planetarium


I used to think that the only celestial body I needed to worry
about was the full moon. Working nights in a newsroom, I figured
I needed to know in advance on which evenings the city desk
telephone would start going crazy. After a few years of that, no
one had to convince me of the connection between full moons and
crank phone calls.

But actually, in the day-to-day life of a newspaper, the moon is
not the only object in the nighttime sky that should interest us.

o When a reader calls to ask the identity of that bright light on
the western horizon, wouldn't it be nice to be able to illustrate
that her trust in you was not misplaced? Show her you can tell
the difference between, say, Venus and Jupiter.
o Or what about when it's time for another meteor shower? There's
your staff artist, working on the graphic that will accompany
your science reporter's story, and he needs help with his
constellations. Suddenly, it's you who is able to separate Leo
from Taurus.
o Or suppose NASA has put Mars back in the news again. You want
to be able to tell your readers when the Red Planet rises and
sets over your town and how to distinguish it from all the other
thousands of points of light up there.

All you need for these and dozens of other astronomical
opportunities is a little help from your friends on the Web. A
site called Your Sky, created by Net entrepreneur John Walker,
gives you a virtual planetarium that can be customized to the
coordinates of your specific community.

Use the site's Sky Map feature to produce astronomical maps by
entering the time and date, viewpoint and observing location
(latitude/longitude and ascension/declination). A Virtual
Telescope helps you track comets and asteroids, and the Horizon
Views feature provides views of the stars above the horizon as
seen from a specified observing site at any given date and time.

Best of all, you don't have to be a science wonk to use these
tools. The biggest stumbling block for most of us trying to use
general purpose skywatcher software is that we don't know the
exact map coordinates of the portion of the sky that we desire to
view.

With Your Sky, all you have to do is consult a hypertext list of
major cities around the world. Furthermore, if you want to aim
your telescope at a certain planet or stellar body, there's a
hypertext list of those items as well.

To use this powerful resource, visit the site at
http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky,
where an introductory page provides details of the
site's major tools and data entry boxes for setting your viewing
location from anywhere in the world. If you find yourself using
the site often, you might want to make a printout of the
introductory screen to file as a handy reference.

Other considerations for using Your Sky in your writing and
editing:

1. For assistance using specific sections of the Your Sky site,
click the link to the "help file" on the introductory screen. A
subsequent display provides hyperlinks to discussions on the
control panels and custom settings for the Sky Map, Horizon Views
and Virtual Telescope, as well as background on symbols used,
definition of terms and related topics.

2. Your Sky can display the sky as it appeared on any date and
time from 4713 B.C. to the distant future (though the sun, moon
and planets are not shown for dates beyond 8000 A.D., since the
technique used to calculate their positions is not valid beyond
that date). To use it, click the Make a Sky Map button on the
introductory page and plug in dates and times on the resulting
screen.

3. Of particular value in answering readers' questions about
bright lights in the evening sky will be site's Horizon Views
tool. This shows the stars and planets above the horizon in any
direction from a specific location at any given date and time.
Again, if you don't know the latitude and longitude of the
desired location, click the feature's "nearby city" link and
choose a location from the resulting hyperlinked list.

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Bowen writes columns, articles and books from West Virginia, and is host of the daily Internet News syndicated radio show (http://www.netnewstoday.com).
charlesbowen@compuserve.com


Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher