Where Night Skies Are Always Clear

The classic, 1951 science fiction flick “The Thing” ends with a character crying out to the world, “Watch the skies!”

His plea was meant as a warning, but unless you spend time worrying that James Arness in an oversized alien costume is about to descend upon the Earth in a spaceship (as he did in the movie), you can interpret that plea as an invitation.

The recent achievements of the Galileo spacecraft, now in orbit around Jupiter, reminded us all of the wonders of the solar system. But just watching the skies does little good helping to satisfy our curiosity. In Los Angeles, at least, there are precious few nights when we can even see the sky through the haze of smog and fog.

For the real lowdown on events high up, you have to watch your computer screen. The most entertaining and informative digital outposts for laypeople interested in Jupiter and Galileo are on the Internet, although some CD-ROMs are devoted to exploring the solar system.

One of the most accessible of the CD-ROMs is “The Planets,” developed by the Byron Preiss Multimedia Co. using materials gleamed from Scientific American Library. As with most Byron Preiss products, this one sports a beautifully designed interface, but overall, the disk, which comes in Windows and Macintosh editions, is disappointing. The controls used to get around it are clumsy, and the developers missed the opportunity to exploit the multimedia potential of digital media.

“Redshift2” from Maris Multimedia (for Mac and Windows) and “First Light” from Virtual Reality Laboratories (for Windows) are both impressively comprehensive and inventive on-screen planetarium CD-ROMs, offering the user enormous flexibility in exploring the night sky. But they are so comprehensive that they are geared more to people who want to devote serious computer time to outer-space explorations.

For dabblers like me, the Internet is the best place to get a quick hit of astronomical wonderment.

One of the best places to begin is “The Nine Planets” (https://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets.html), a delightful site created by astronomer Bill Arnett of San Jose. It’s divided into numerous sections (it’s so varied that one even leads you to sound clips from composer Gustav Holst’s “The Planets”), including one for each planet.

The Jupiter page includes basic known facts about it and its moons, and the page provides links to spectacular photos taken by satellites (including the Hubble telescope).

Another good online tour is provided at “Views of the Solar System” (https://bang.lanl.gov/solarsys/), a site maintained by Calvin Hamilton at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It includes awe-inspiring information that puts the planet’s size in perspective: “If Jupiter were hollow, more than 1,000 Earths could fit inside. It also contains more matter than all of the other planets combined.” The site also sports links to numerous pictures and animations.

And specifically for Galileo watchers, there is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s “Project Galileo Home Page” (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov:80/galileo/index.html). It starts off with an “Amazing Fact of the Day,” such as that the radio signals from Galileo are so incredibly weak that they are “about a billion times fainter than the sound of a transistor radio in New York as heard from Los Angeles.”

It goes on to offer the latest news about the project, its history, a schedule of future planned events and even a link to a status report that gives the exact position in space of Galileo, updated every minute.

* Cyburbia’s Internet address is David.Colker@latimes.com.