Southern Gems Team Update

Dear Southern Gems Teammates, Very early on Tuesday morning I will be leaving for San Francisco and will be out there for a week. During that time I will be visiting some friends at Astronomical Society of the Pacific from NASA Night Sky Network and from Sept 2-5 I will be attending the Citizen Sky Workshop. Our team member David Benn will also be there explaining about VStar and teaching people how to use it, and PJ (Spaceblanket) will also be there. I will have internet access while I'm there, so we can keep working as usual to try to finish our tutorial. If you have any questions, just ask and if I don't answer, I'm sure someone else on the team who is in the know, will answer. I will be doing a very short talk to the group about our team, and of course I will have nothing but wonderful things to say about all of you because I would bet you are the best team of all! haha.. Seriously, it is a privilege to work with all of you. Our team works together so well, I think. To update everyone, Sebastian is working on finishing the star chart sequences and Julio is working on the first pages of the tutorial which we needed to change from the Northern Tutorial. Instead of epsilon Aurigae as the example star, we will be using Alpha Orionis. So all those pages explaining how to do the observation using that star and the star maps will be different from the Northern Tutorial. Also, we needed a new map showing Southern Hemisphere constellations. All of this is being worked on. When these things are finished, Jonatas will put all of our tutorial into one big PDF. Right now you can find our star table on the website here as a pdf. When all is finished, Jonatas and Marcelo Souza will translate the tutorial into Portuguese and Julio and Sebastian will translate it into Spanish. After that is done, I know many of you will be able to get this out to the public to be used, so for many of you, your job will be one of convincing others to use the tutorial and for you to use it and give feedback it. I look forward to hearing from many of you while I'm out there in California. I so much wish our whole team could be there together. What fun that would be! But keep the fires burning and keep working toward our goal, those of you with the present jobs.Take care,Joan