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From the Vaults

Musical ramblings from the manager

AstroCal – November 2024

       November will be an interesting month to watch the planets dance across the sky, especially Jupiter and Venus.  On November 4, Jupiter will rise in the east just before Venus sets in the west.  Both will be bright (magnitude -2.8 and -3.9 respectively) so they won’t be hard to see even though they will […]

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FTV: Lake Superior II (revisited)

      Although there is no prohibition on revisiting past topics in these FTV chronicles, every once in a while a story comes up that is too good to leave in the past.  With the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald only a year away, I felt compelled to revisit this historical event.  In […]

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FTV: Subscription Blues

       I mourn the loss of brick and motar bookstores.  Book World in downtown Houghton was my favorite because when we would stop by to browse, I always managed to find the newest issue of Classic Rock Magazine or Mojo to keep me in touch with the music scene.  When the entire Book World franchise […]

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AstroCal – October 2024

       Comets do not always behave as advertised.  Sometimes they are not as spectacular as predicted and sometimes they perform beyond what is expected.  I will let our friends at Sky Calendar cover what may happen on the cometary front this month:  “There’s a chance that Comet C/2023 A3 may surge in brightness around October […]

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FTV: The Six

       Here are five names that are included in the above title:  Rhea Seddon, Shannon Lucid, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, and Judy Resnik.  If you have an idea who these women are, then you are probably a space junky like me.  If none of these names rings a bell, then the sixth name will probably […]

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FTV: Don Aronson et al

       Even if school wasn’t your favorite place to be growing up, I am going to lay odds that you have memories of at least one of your teachers.  While attending school was always one of those things we were mandated to do before we were set free into ‘the real world’, there were always […]

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FTV: Educational Technology

            On one of the occasions when my mother’s father was staying with us for a few days back in the mid-1960s, I had an interesting discussion with him while playing cribbage.  Grandpa was never overly talkative so it took a bit to get him to carry on a conversation.  With the CBS news about […]

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