We’ve been looking at a lot of cloud bottoms lately. Today they’re about to drop water on us, and I’m hoping they’ll clear up before tonight so I can look at Mars. But what do you do when you’re rained out and still want to enjoy some astronomy?

I like to read astronomy books. There is a stack of them in my office, waiting to be read. Things with titles like “Handbook of Infrared Astronomy” because I always wanted to understand how IR folks do their thing. There’s also Deep-Sky Wonders” — a book I edited for Sky Publishing, back when I was a books and products editor. Actually amateur observer Steve O’Meara was the first editor on the book, which is a compilation of the best and coolest columns by long-time Sky & Telescope columnist Walter Scott Houston. It came across my desk for final editing and fact checking and I spent many months poring over the words before they went to press. Then for about a year I couldn’t bear to look at the book because I was too close to it. Now, more recently though, I’ve been taking it down off the shelf and reading about starhopping from the Big Dipper or galaxy hunting in Corona Borealis, or other such little goodies that are forever enshrined in the book. It’s good armchair astronomy, especially when the cloud bottoms get to be too much.

Occasionally I get off on a science fiction jag, reading back issues of Analog or Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to pass the time. Or, if I’m really bored, there’s also Web surfing for cool astronomy pictures!

But if you’re not into reading or Web surfing is getting old, what else can you do? Some folks have the full Cosmos TV series, first broadcast on public television in the early 1980s. That’s a great one to watch, particularly if you’re faced with a string of foggy, cloudy nights. You learn a lot from Carl Sagan’s exploration of the universe in that series, and it does keep you going until the next sucker hole in the clouds opens up and welcomes you back to an evening of stargazing!