On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Apparently, there was an OpenGL issue that kept crashing Gaia Sky on my computers every time I tried to launch the program.

That problem is now history with version 3.0.1. It's fixed. It ran slow on my current iMac the first time I used it, but I am inclined to chalk that up to my choosing to download the EDR3 "medium" dataset for use with Gaia Sky. 4 GB to download, it self-extracts into a 14 GB file once it gets to your machine! I think I want to install more RAM to run such a thing with, right?

Lots and lots of stars with only 16-digit GAIA DR#-prefixed catalogue numbers instead of names so far to run around to. Hoping the search function allows for a lot of fun. I would really like for the Gaia Sky and Celestia programming teams to network a bit.

For my astronomy-minded friendlisters: Bailer-Jones or StarHorse for your GAIA DR2-derived interstellar distance measurements?

https://t.co/1136TDgARC

I tried GAIA Sky 2.0 out on my newer-yet-still-second-hand Macbook this afternoon. Had a fair bit of difficulty working with the user interface after an hour or so. Not impossible, but I do need to do some further studying with it.

For the space data nerds among my friendlisters, here's something new among the stuff that's been whipped up in the wake of GAIA DR 2:

http://gaia-kepler.fun/

I didn't notice that you could selectively hide or reveal specific data-columns until tonight, just a few minutes ago.

Also noticed: In 32 days of the current year gone by thus far, we have two more exoplanets confirmed thus far: One orbiting a star from the Tycho catalogue about 1,800 lightyears away (give or take roughly 300 ly), and another orbiting HD 238914 at about 1,900 ly (again, give or take roughly 300 ly).

Small wonder that the International Astronomical Union's been slowly making inroads through public competitions on naming the planets our astronomers across the planet have been logging in. One could wish that this process might move faster, especially given the sense that between GAIA, Kepler, JWST, and whatever else is in the planet-hunting/astrometry pipeline, we're in for a flood of new and useful data in the next few years.

I feel as if there's more intelligent commentary I could make, but I'm not sure which direction to steer towards.