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Johannesburg Centre,
Astronomical Society of Southern Africa
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Web Between The Worlds This month’s first featured site was chosen to get all the budding ATMers out there into the mood for this years class, which incidentally kicks of the first weekend in October. This page is actually just the links section of the Wega Home Page, situated in Leuven, Flanders, the Dutch speaking section of Belgium. This is a good launching point for anyone interested in finding out more about ATM and CCD. The address is: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/joost_verheyden/linksATM.htm Other Worlds, Distant Suns is an award-winning, graphically-intensive site well worth visiting if you have an interest in extrasolar planets. The site is fairly well designed and download time is better than I expected. Unfortunately, it makes use of VRML, which means newer browsers only, and the LIVE3D plug-in. This may limit the sites audience. The site has lots of nice goodies, such as the cool map of all known extrasolar planets, the 65 nearest stars and all stars within a 100 LY radius. Sure, it’s been done before, but this site gives it a little “Ooomph!”. Check it out at: For the finale, I will quote directly from the page concerned: “AJ's Cosmic Thing is a robust, full-featured sky plotter applet, capable of rendering moving, interactive full-sky plots of brighter sky objects, as seen from any point on earth. Aimed primarily at the casual observer, the Cosmic Thing boasts a rich set of features that help make understanding celestial motions simple, and that help make the sky a familiar, comprehensible thing. Above all, the applet is designed to show the sky as the dynamic, changing thing it is. The plots actually move, illustrating the changes over minutes, hours, days, weeks or months -- demonstrating such subtle phenomena as transits, retrograde motions of the planets, eclipses, and seasonal changes in visible constellations.” Make sure you have a Java 1.0.2. or higher compliant browser, and point it at: http://www.mindentimes.on.ca/CosmicThing/Intro.html Remember, if you find a site that you think the society would like to know about, send me the URL and I will include it in this column. Evan Dembskey |
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