Eye On The Sky

Monday night we went to the lecture at the Bixby Library in Vergennes. The speaker was Mark Breen from the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury Vermont. Mark is best known for his deep melodious voice doing the weather forecasts on Vermont Public Radio for as long as I can remember. He does more though. The museum has a planetarium. (The only one in Vermont.) The purpose of his lecture was to promote a Stellarium kiosk that will rotate among Vermont libraries to promote interest in astronomy.

The lecture was fun. Mark is a very good speaker. His act though was upstaged by a marvelous introduction by Rachel, the librarian. Rachel spoke with such enthusiasm and animation that audience members like ourselves felt motivated to jump up with spontaneous applause. Really, Rachel should find a career in radio, or TV, or politics, or a narrator, or an audio book reader; anything that would let her use her voice publicly.

Tuesday morning, I went off to Vergennes in search of a WiFi signal. I went to the porch of the bar called Antidote where I had good luck last week. Last week I was able to sit on the porch at a table, plug in the laptop and get a good WiFi signal, all in the morning when the bar was closed. The next time I went there, their WiFi signal had changed to secure; a password was needed. I wondered if it was because of me. No matter, I sat at the table and plugged in and found another WiFi signal from some place across the street. The third time I went there, the chairs had been removed too. Now I really wonder if some silent observer really didn't like me using their facilities for free. We're in a race. Private owners of WiFi are locking down their sites one by one. At the same time, municipalities and others are opening up city and regional wide wireless access.

Anyhow, I used the WiFi to download our own free copy of Stellarium from www.stellarium.org.

Simply stated, it is a full blown planetarium that you can run in your laptop. Its features are optimized for use as a companion as you are star gazing at night. We have never been very successful before in identifying stars and other objects using star charts. We tried Stellarium last night and it made things much easier. The keys to success are that you can rotate and zoom the view to match what
you're looking at, and also that the depiction of star brightness on the screen is much more realistic than can be portrayed on paper. In a short time we were not only able to identify key stars, we were able to do it with great confidence. Using the binoculars I was also able to see four moons of Jupiter for the first time in my life. Wow. Way cool.

Today, we're heading North again to Willsboro Bay. We're going to meet my friend Pete there tomorrow. Pete is driving up from Albany to go on a day sail with us. This weekend, we'll have my son John and grandson Nick on board. Boy are we spoiled. We bounce from one fun thing to another to another.

We used the asymmetrical spinnaker today. We still have a few things to learn about it. Once I tried to gybe and one of the sheets went all the way under the hull and got stuck there by water pressure. It came back up soiled by the anti fouling bottom paint. Then, the wind picked up to 16-17 knots and it was too much for the sail. When trying to douse it we got in trouble again. The control line for the sock dangled down before the bow and got fouled on the cotter pin holding the bobstay clevis. It to was held by water pressure and we had to damage the line to get it free.