What to do when the weather isn’t cooperating with your desire to do astronomy? That’s the question of the ages. Last night, for example, I was all ready to observe the occultation of Saturn by the Moon. We had lots of breaks in the clouds (often called sucker holes) up to 30 minutes or so before the main event (which occurred at 7:32 p.m. at my location). Then, the rain clouds moved in, and by occultation time it was starting to sprinkle. The heavy rains soon followed. Well, we needed the rain…

What did I do? Since I’m in the middle of writing a new book about astronomy (plus a planetarium script about HST science) I came back in here and worked on the computer for a while. The European Southern Observatory site has some wonderful pictures and results from their many telescope installations in Chile. I noodled around there for a while, enjoying the views across the light-years and downloading some interesting additions to the chapter on galaxies.

If you’re clouded out from observing, it’s probably easiest to plop yourself in front of the ol’ Boob Toob and watch whatever plays across the screen. Sometimes I do that, if I’m not feeling particularly motivated and don’t want to work on my projects any more. But, with the Olympics on, I either watch those, or I can eschew the Plasma Goddess completely for some good reading. Lately I’ve been ploughing through some books for review, and of course I always have a science fiction mag or two to read.

Occasionally I fire up some astronomy software and explore the sky that way. I can always say that I’m learning about tomorrow’s sky — provided it clears up!