A cherished childhood toy

When I was about 7, Dad gave me a wonderful educational toy called the AstroExplorer. It's a nifty little gadget for seeing constellations.

The AstroExplorer is a small plastic gadget with a flashlight bulb that's almost completely blacked out. You open it up, slip a disk of black paper into the base with a constellation in white on it, then fit the two pieces together again. The light bulb (powered by an AA battery) puts out a very dim light that backlights the paper and shines dimly through the white bits. You hold the AstroExplorer up to one eye and look with the other eye at the sky so that the constellation image overlays the stars in the sky and voila! Thanks to the miracle of binocular vision, you can see the constellation in the sky with some of the star names, the connecting lines, and a drawing of the figure in the constellation. The disks also have arrows pointing to other constellations nearby, the ecliptic, and so on.

I love this toy, both because of how cool it is and because it reminds me of Dad whenever I look at it. (I may take it with us when we go visit him this December.) Although the manufacturer, Tri-G Company in Venice, CA, vanished decades ago, you can still buy these for $10 or so on eBay. They're a wonderful gift for anyone who likes stargazing.

A cherished childhood toy

Two websites you should try out

I wanted to take a moment amidst my suddenly hurly-burly schedule and let you know about two really cool websites.

The first is SpaceWeather.com. SpaceWeather is a website that tells you all sorts of interesting things about what's going on in the sky. The neatest part may be their satellite tracker: you enter your zip code, postal code, or country, then it shows you where and when to look in the sky for interesting manmade objects that are visible to the naked eye: the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle Discovery, several large satellites, and things like that. Very cool stuff! The whole site is worth romping around for all sorts of interesting astronomical happenings.

The second site is Wordle.com, a juicy little nugget for the literarily inclined. Wordle generates word clouds from text that you provide it by analyzing the frequency of words in the text and then assigning a greater prominence to the words that appear more frequently. You can then change the cloud by changing the colors, fonts, and layouts. It's really quite fun! Feed Wordle the text of your latest article, or a manual draft, or that novel you've been working on. Or go to, say, Project Gutenberg, and grab something and try that out. It's a great time-waster, as if I had time to waste these days. (One of the joys of working on database engines is that you've always got something interesting to work on at any hour of the day or night.)

Try both of them out sometime. They're a lot of fun!

Two websites you should try out