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Star lovers, forget our little star charts, this is the program for you. Stellarium gives you the view of the sky as you see it, with a foreground included to help orientation. Unfortunately the foreground is a field, rather than the Tobago Cays, but we can live with that. You add in the lat and long you want and give it a place name (it will save it for quick selection later). You put in the time you want and up comes the evening sky just as you will see it. The default orientation is looking south but you can just grab that and swing round in all directions. Like any new program it will take you a few minutes to figure out how to make it all work, but once you get the hang of it is very simple and intuitive. You need a reasonable connection to download the program which is about 50 Meg.
A couple of tools have come on line that can be useful to the navigator. I know most of you have already discovered Google Earth (below). But there is a program that does the same using aerial photos instead of satellite imagery for the French territories. The detail is stunning. You can also swing between photo image and map. It may well help me in future with details that I am not sure about. The disadvantage is most photos are a year or more old. I am not sure how often it is updated. My thanks to Françoise et Joël for turning me onto this.
Google Earth is probably the best fun. You need to download a small program onto your computer. This puts you at the controls of what seems to be a space ship that enables you spin round the earth and zoom in anywhere at will. (With a big screen and enough fast maneuvering it might also be a way to screen for motion sickness in potential crew) Although it feels like this - it is a construct from satellite photos using 3-d programming. The good thing is you can check the date of the photos, the bad thing is coverage is uneven (Testigos was completely missing as I write this, and Los Roques was no more than a color blur). But where the photos are good it can be useful, and in any case it is fun. In good shots the detail is good enough to make out larger docks. The photo below is a screen grab to give you an idea of what you see.
In the newest version of Google Earth you can also go the stars and visit distant galaxies including some of the Hubble photography. On the earth side they include photo files. Not to be outdone MSN has launched Virtual Earth at this point it is more map than imagery and pretty poor detail on Caribbean maps at that. But I have no doubt this will change and it will be worth checking the site from time to time. No downloads necessary at this point.
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