If the skies are clear where you live tomorrow night (or tonight, depending on your time zone), don’t miss your chance to witness the last lunar eclipse until Dec. 2010.

Here in Hawaii, I’ll be heading out to the beach around 11 p.m. While I won’t be bringing my Mac with me, this event marks a great occasion to highlight a few of the astronomy programs available for OS X. These tools are excellent teaching aids and are just plain enjoyable. If you don’t have a Mac, no worries: each of these apps run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

If you go outside to watch for the eclipse, keep an eye out for Saturn (if you have a telescope the rings will be visible) and Regulus (the 22nd brightest star in the night sky, in the Leo constellation).

Saturn and Regulus will be the brightest points in the sky nearest to the eclipsed moon. Exactly where they will appear relative to you, of course, will depend on your location and the time you go outside to have a look — but they will appear to be close to the moon.

Cloudy out? View the solar system on your Mac

1. Stellarium — Free. This planetarium application specializes on views of the sky from an earthly perspective. Enter your coordinates to see what's going on in your sky on a given night. This is my app of choice for casual desktop sky-gazing; it's also a great learning aid. I enjoy setting the program to fast-forward so I can watch the sky come to life in quicktime. There are many user-contributed scripts available to enhance your Stellarium experience which make an already interesting program even more engaging. This is a great program to keep on your Mac for those times when you want to quickly identify a star or constellation.

2. Google Earth — Free. It isn’t just for earth-browsing any more. Check out the ‘Sky’ view mode for a full-featured astronomy package chock full of user-contributed goodness. I’ve lost many hours engrossed in the ‘Sky’ view; this Google Earth expansion is still a pretty new feature, but it keeps getting better and better.

3. Celestia — Free. Celestia doesn’t confine you to viewing stars from an earth-bound perspective. You are free to fly around the visible universe in dizzying three dimensions. There are many, many expansions available for Celestia that make it even more fun and valuable as a learning tool. The one thing about Celestia is that it’s not quite as easy to use as the other programs; still, it’s an amazing tool with a dedicated user base and it’s a joy to use.

4. Starry Night — Expensive. I own an old Mac OS 9 version of Starry Night Pro and I still use it on my old iBook G4 in Classic mode (note that Classic only runs on Tiger and earlier versions of Mac OS X). It’s come a long way since then and is worth checking out if you really enjoy astronomy and want a feature-rich package with many great animations and photo-realistic imagery. Even the old version of Starry Night that I own is visually very beautiful. It’s a great teaching aid to view the solar system in motion from any perspective, watch eclipses, find satellites, view the earth from distant planets, and more. If you go for the Pro package, you can hook up your Mac to your telescope to track distant objects. My only problem with Starry Night is that it seems to have gone overboard a bit with commercialization — there are now at least six SN packages to choose from, and all of them are pricey.

My favorite experience with Starry Night? Heading out in a canoe late at night with my old iBook back in my home state of Maine on Nicatous Lake (far, far away from any light pollution), turning on Starry Night’s ‘night vision mode’ and spending a few hours looking up at the sky. Note that this is only enjoyable in the summer while doused with about one gallon of bug spray to keep the mosquitos away.

More Mac astronomy links

If Mac astronomy software interests you, check out Pure Mac's comprehensive list of astronomy apps for more ideas. Hope the skies are clear wherever you may live.

There’s an ongoing struggle in my household. I don’t want to use any names…but if it weren’t for my tireless, unrelenting efforts to keep my iMac (which is shared by one other person) free of desktop clutter, there would now be a virtual sea of files cluttering our desktop. You might never guess I was an organized person if you happened to open my sock drawer, but I keep the Mac lean and clean. The only icons I prefer to see on my desktop are mounted drives. To be fair, I drive my wife crazy (ok it’s my wife, but I won’t use her name) with some of my user habits because I can’t leave the Mac alone. I’m always installing things, deleting things, moving things, changing things … above all, I like to test out third party mac software.

So, you may ask, why on earth do we share one user account on our primary Mac? It’s not the recommended way to do business. The preferred solution is to create separate user accounts; this is more secure and it gives you the freedom to organize your own workspace just how you want it. But I maintain there is at least one scenario when a shared account makes sense — when you have a Mac that always stays at home and you and one other person you completely trust are using it to share the same pool of data.

We share the same music library, the same iPhoto library … we share pretty much all of our data. For several years, we managed seperate accounts, but I grew weary of constantly dropping and dragging files and folders back and forth. We had iPhoto and iTunes set up for sharing, but this requires one to be logged in to both accounts to access the others shared photo/music content. Much of the mail we receive is for both of us. It just seemed easier to combine the two.

Would I recommend this arrangement? Again, and this is critical: only if you completely trust that one other person and you can live with different user habits on one account. For me and my wife, life is just easier using one account, despite our different organizational styles. I’d venture to guess that no one would really recommend this set up, but it’s good for us. Here are a few of the ways we make it work. Even if you don’t share an account, this list may provide you with some fresh ideas.

 

1. Admin or Standard account?

We set up our shared account up with 'Standard' user privileges and then created a separate Admin account. This is a good practice, even if you don't share an account. If you want to learn more about user accounts, check out this affordable E-book from TidBITS.

2. IC-Switch and DeliBar

We prefer to use different browsers and news readers, so we use IC-Switch. This free little Menu Bar application allows us to quickly toggle between default internet applications. I also use a Menu Bar application called DeliBar that allows me to view my stored online bookmarks (via my del.icio.us account) right in my Menu Bar. I like managing and storing my bookmarks online because it enables me to access my favorites in any browser, and in any location. If you like Menu Bar items, by the way, check out this list.

3. Documents folder

We created three main subfolders within our Documents folder: one for me, one for my wife, and one for shared items such as our finances. We did the same for our Pictures folder (for those images that we do not want to manage from within iPhoto). We use color labels to easily identify our folders at a glance e— my folders are labeled with red, my wife's are purple, and folders with shared documents are gray.

4. Alternate keyboard languages

Things are a bit more complicated for us because I use the Dvorak keyboard layout and my wife uses Qwerty. Solution? We set up our Mac with both languages via the 'International' system preference (System Preferences > International > Input Menu). We then checked the option to 'Show the Input Menu in menu bar' so we have a nice visual way to see what language is currently active. Finally, we established a key combination to quickly toggle between the two input languages (this option is also available in the Input Menu).

5. The Dock

I don't really use the Dock, but my wife does. She also uses Spotlight, and I never do. I use Launchbar to launch applications and navigate around the Mac (a free alternative is QuickSilver); DragThing is my preferred 'Dock replacement.'

6. Finder

My wife uses Finder and I use PathFinder. This works out well — she can set up Finder just how she likes it and I can set up PathFinder with my personal preferences. If you've never tried PathFinder, by the way, give it a spin. I couldn't live without it. Some people say, though, that it has too many features and options.

7. Web browsing

I use Firefox when I'm doing webwork and OmniWeb when I'm just having fun. My wife prefers Safari.

That’s about it. One final note: I recently downloaded the trial for a program called Hazel from NoodleSoft. This little program automates file organization, manages trash, monitors and organizes folders, and more. It’s very clever and quite easy to use. I think this may be a great new tool to help me and my wife manage our shared account.

This is a quick note about an experience I recently had with customer support from Agile Web Solutions, the creators of 1Password.

I’m not going to review this application — there are already hundreds of available online comments and reviews. Suffice it to say that I’ve come to depend on 1Password so much that I recently decided to upgrade my family license (good for three Macs) to the Small Business package (good for five Macs).

I emailed the company with my request and received a response within the hour. I was naturally pleased to get such a rapid reply. I was doubly surprised because I sent the request late in the evening from my home in Hawaii; I’m accustomed to waiting until the next business day (when North America is awake) for customer service. But that’s not the amazing part.

Here’s a clip from the message I received from a man named James in Australia, identified as a ‘passionate 1Password user:’

“Since the upgrade is not automatic, I have gone ahead and updated your license to a Small Business license and sent it in a separate email. I trust you will make the payment, so I don’t want to make you wait."

I then received my license moments later.

This struck me as a particularly generous and trusting thing to do in this day and age, and it was much appreciated. So, I want to thank the 1Password team for the stellar service. This transaction served as a fresh reminder of why I feel like I am part of a community as a Mac user.

In case you missed it, Alsoft DiskWarrior is ready to go for Mac OS X Leopard. Soon, existing owners of Disk Warrior 4 will be able to download this update and burn a new disk to run the program. DiskWarrior is an essential tool. It’s a little pricey ($100), but it’s worth it. It just might save the day if your hard drive starts to head south and you need to recover your data.

ShirtPockets SuperDuper! version 2.5 also came out today after a long, long wait. It is now ready for Leopard, and it’s a free update for all licensed users. Nine out of 10 Mac users agree: this is the best disk cloning backup software available. If you don’t think you need to clone your data since you now use Apple’s Time Machine, see my previous post on the topic.

I recently read an article about potential future growth in the iPod market centered around the Wi-Fi mobile platform introduced with the iPod Touch. Now that I have experienced Wi-Fi access in this great little handheld device, I could never go back. This is surely the future of handhelds.

I’m on week three with my new Touch, and I have to say I love it. The addition of the Mail, Notes, Maps, and Safari browser is fantastic. It’s utterly transformed how I use my iPod. I can’t wait to see what the independent Mac software community comes up with to make this even a better device once Apple releases the software development kit later this month.

However, there is one thing that really bugs me about my new iPod: the lack of tactile controls to play, pause, and change songs. With my old 3G iPod, I could plug it into my car stereo and change songs on the fly without looking at it. This isn’t possible now, and I’m told the iPod remote (with the built-in FM transmitter) doesn’t work with the Touch.

I’ve read that the iPod Nano Remote Control will work with the iPod Touch, but I mail-ordered a similar low-end remote before for my old iPod and it was cheap and flimsy. In fact, I ended up sending it back because it failed within a week. I need a good remote!

Now, following Apple’s announcement today, there is one more thing that bugs me about my Touch. I patiently waited for Macworld before I bought my iPod Touch explicitly to ensure Apple wasn’t about to launch an updated version with more memory. I have over 20GB of music alone. Alas, they didn’t announce anything new for the iPod line during the Expo, so I happily bought a 16GB model … confident that the next iPod Touch update would be far in the future (or at least several months away).

Now, less than three weeks after I buy my 16GB model, they announce a 32GB version for $100 more. Apple is surely aware that many people wait for Macworld before plunking down money on a new piece of Mac gear. Couldn’t they have announced this a few weeks ago during their biggest consumer show of the year? Perhaps this was a tactic to reduce their 8 and 16GB reserves. Geez. I could really use that extra space. Anyone want to buy a slightly used 16GB iPod Touch?