Astronomical Society of Eastern Missouri

These pages are updated frequently and we hope everyone enjoys this but, as the sites get bigger, it becomes harder for the readers to keep up.  We are working to get even more contributors so the situation will only intensify.

However, Technology to the rescue!  Our web pages have a feature known as RSS feeds  (note the little icon at the bottom of the page that says RSS).  Some of you may know about, and use, this technology already, but for the rest of you it is a neat tool.

The basic idea is that every time an addition is made to the web page, a small file on the site is updated.  There are programs available (I will describe one below) that allow your computer to read this file and let you know of any changes and provide you a link directly to them.  No more reading the whole web page to find out what’s new for yourself.

There are many ways to do this but the one I like is to add an extension to the Firefox browser (you ARE using Firefox, aren’t you?).  If you are one of the few who haven’t dumped Internet Explorer, go over to

Get Firefox.

and get Firefox.  (Do it now, I will wait.)

From within Firefox, navigate to

Sage

follow the links to install Sage (it’s easy).

You’ll have to exit from Firefox and re-start it for Sage to be activated but then turn on Sage from the Tools menu or press Alt-S.  Sage has some pre-installed web sites which you can delete if you like (but try them out to see what Sage does).  Now, if you navigate to one of our pages, click on the magnifying glass in the Sage sidebar and Sage will look for the little file and display it.  Click that you want to save it and Sage will add it to its menu.  Now you can click on the link whenever you feel the need for an up date on our web page and, voila!, they will be listed for you.  (This also works with other pages that might interest you - if they have the feature enabled.)

If you want your lawn watered, just ask me to schedule a public star gazing event near your house!  It started out clear in the morning and all day long the moisture in the air kept rising, condensing and turning into clouds.  Finally, about 4:30 pm all that moisture fell out of the clouds and even generated a severe thunderstorm alert.  By 6:30 pm it looked mostly over and that it might clear, although the satellite images showed very little cloud motion, so I went over to the park to be ready - just in case.

A couple of our members called me on my cell phone and I discouraged them from coming but one other member showed up anyway.  For a while the clouds lessened and we could see nice blue sky.  There was a nice, colorful sunset.  But it didn’t get better.  We could never see a trace of the crescent Moon.

But we had a good time anyway!  There were at least five carloads of hopeful sky watchers who showed up, including a few who seemed interested in following up with our club activities.  One fellow brought a brand new 10-inch telescope that would fit in a carry on bin on an airplane.  The trusses were a carbon fiber material that bent around to pack, but which would ’spring’ open to position all the elements properly (somewhat like backpack tents).  I asked him to demonstrate it at one of our meetings.

This just reinforces my determination to get a permanent meeting site where we can accommodate the public rain or shine (literally!).

Welcome to our newly formatted Web Page!  We hope the new
format will be more informative and easy to use.  There will be
many new features as we get the hang of it.  Stay tuned!