For my most helpful friends at Indigo Books.....

I know I probably took up too much of your time this afternoon, as I babbled on about Mars, and a really neat planetarium program called "Stellarium" which can take us there, at least visually if not for real. If we use our imagination, it may almost seem real....but first, here's the program you should look for......

"And what does it do?" you ask. Let's get it installed and open it, and then look for Mars - one of my favorites...... and incidentally, this stores its own screenshots in its own folder, not your usual "screenshots" folder in Windows, and to put a screenshot into that folder while using Stellarium, we use the keys CTRL + S, not the Windows Key + PrintScreen. But I'm digressing again - sorry! Here's the program running, and zooming in on Mars. To locate it to begin, use the "Search" function found along the program's left margin. If you mouse into the lower left corner and slide the mouse pointer up along that edge, you'll find several choices, including "Search".... so here we go....

But we're not going to land on Mars just now. Instead, we're going to land on its moon Phobos, and have a look at it from there......

This is Mars as seen from its moon Phobos, which is quite small, irregular in shape, and probably wasn't always a moon.... but lets get off this thing, and go to Mars itself, shall we?

Here we are on Mars, and I've set the 'Search' to look for Earth, but all we can see of it are the little red markers, almost into the sun, because from here it is almost directly in line with the sun, unless we zoom in closer.....

Here, I've zoomed in just enough to show you where Earth is this afternoon in relation to the sun, and Mars. (Really far away!) and now, for something entirely different, I've returned us to Earth, where the Moon is visible rising (Objects should be visible from wherever you begin your "travels" before you can "land" on one!) and now we've gone from Earth to the Moon.....but for some reason, we're landing on the Dark Side! Pink Floyd would have loved it! So while we're here, lets look at part of the Milky Way from the dark side of the Moon.....

But you're going to miss your evening's meal unless we go home for it......

So here we are, back home on Earth, standing in a field, looking at the evening's Moon rising. I hope you enjoyed our little "space flight" and will also enjoy taking your own with this program.

And in answer to a question asked this afternoon at Indigo about "What's Windows 10 like?" here's my Desktop of it, and yes, those Gadgets are back, and so is the "Start", sort of.... but you'll see all this in about a month, when its official release arrives, and we set it free from its cage! 

Enjoy your evening, Everyone!