Steve’s Virtual Planet

Moon tools Pt 1 (The Intro)

I’m a tool kinda guy. You know .. Swiss Army knife, a good flashlight, some vice grips, and, of course, a good astronomy app. Web based tools and apps for astronomy and stargazing are really the good stuff. This series is going to delve into various tools I’ve found on the web that help understand our moon better. This is part one, which, implies additional parts, theoretically. So, we’ll see how my research goes and how many tools we find.

Bar none, my favorite web site is still Sky View Cafe (SVC). You can see some of my other posts with details on the features, but my main tip here is to set your SVC startup view to be the calendar instead of the default Sky view. This is easy to do using the “More…” button up in the right corner.  Click on more and then on Preferences. Change the second setting value to Calendar and then click OK. This will set the applet to go to the calendar whenever it starts. From here, the moon phases are in full display with a graphic for each day.

In one of my previous postings, I featured an animation to show the Moon orbiting the Earth. This is a great applet from The University of Nebraska that has three different views of the effect of lunar phases from Earth’s perspective. At the same website, I also found a really useful animation that shows how the effect of the moon’s gravity and our proximity to the sun sets up the tides.

See how far you get with these suggestions. You can even howl if you like!!