01 May 2007

1 May 2007

Where shall we keep the holiday, And duly greet the entering May?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

May (Maius) In honor of Maia, the Roman. Goddess of Green Growth.



I see in the June issue of S&T, page 5, that Mead has announced a knockoff of the Celestron Sky Scout, called mySky. It looks like it does everything the Sky Scout does and some more. It hooks up to your Mead scope, if you have one, to move it to the target you point at and adds GPS capability to scopes without it. It is shaped like a pistol and you sight over illuminated pistol sights on the top of it. There are color images of some objects and it directs you to objects with a big illuminated arrow in a monitor screen rather than combinations of lights in the view port. $399, same as the Sky Scout. No availability date stated. I am surprised it wasn't at NEAF.



Also in the June S&T is a review of a facsimile edition of Harminia Marrocosmica called Andreas Cellarius after the original author. I saw this book some months ago sitting in a stack on the floor of Barnes & Noble down by NYU. It is a huge biil and weighs a ton. It isn't really a facsimile although all of the original material has been reproduced. It also includes explanatory background material and detail views of some of the original illustrations. The text is presented in English, French and German translations (I don't knwo what language(s) the original was printed in. $125. ISBN 13978-3-8228-5290-3

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