About Dark Skies

Welcome to Dark Skies (again). Since you're reading this, you probably want to know a bit more about the site. If you want to find out a bit more about me, go here and follow the link to my informal home page.

Here at Dark Skies, a lot of questions are asked. At least, it's fun to pretend that a lot of questions are asked. For efficiency reasons, questions which have really been asked have been mixed with questions which should have been asked in the opinion of people who don't ask questions. This results in a nice, informative document which turns out to be more practical than it would be if it were empty.

Read on.

Dark Skies is a general astronomy-based web site maintained by me. It originally began because I was interested in properly hammering into my head how to write HTML. For me, the best way to learn is to do it. Since then, it's just stayed and grown a little.

Because of this "learning HTML" philosophy, you might notice me occasionally getting carried away with presentation in the newsletter. This is because information is a million times more useful if people can find it easily. :-)

Some people might also notice a small bias towards things to do with New Zealand. New Zealand is where I live. :-)

Yes. I'm putting a lot of time and effort into Dark Skies. The least you can please do is to politely report anything you find that is incorrect or not working properly. Thank you.

No, you're in the wrong place. :-)

I do think Dark Skies (the TV show) was a great X-Files clone, but this site is completely unrelated to the show with the exception of this paragraph.

Most of what's here is a compilation of my own collection of astronomical information and views. If it looks opinionated, biased or sarcastic, it probably is. :-) I recommend you do not rely on anything you find here in a life and death situation.

There are several reasons why I haven't placed a lot of pictures around Dark Skies. The main reason is to save server space. A picture can be worth a thousand words, but often I would rather use the thousand words - it only takes a tenth the space of a picture. Unfortunately, Dark Skies is operating on a budget. At least at this stage, I don't want to flood it with commercialism - especially if it's only to store a few images.

Also, in my experience there are many people who like looking at space pictures, but they miss the whole point and enjoyment of astronomy. Astronomy itself is what Dark Skies is really interested in promoting. Getting the most out of astronomy usually involves going out and actually doing something, not just looking at pictures. (Opinions might vary.)

If people want photographs, there are a lot of other places they can be found around the internet.

Dark Skies looks best through either Netscape 3+, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4+ with an 800x600 or better resolution. I try to make most of it as universally accessible as possible, but if your browser does not support tables, it will most likely look very messed up. (Nearly everything on the net will look very messed up if your browser doesn't support tables.) Frames are optional. Without them you won't get the menu bar accross the top of the browser window.

I write stuff and put it up, but usually it's not perfect to begin with. Every so often I read what's there and change what I don't like. If you see any mistakes such as spelling mistakes, typing mistakes, or informative mistakes, please email me.

If you are interested in seeing the life story of a document, try viewing the source code of it with your browser. When I'm maintaining most documents on Dark Skies, I keep a record in undisplayed HTML comments of when the document was written, and any dates it has been adjusted. Typically it looks something like this:

<!-- WRITTEN = 1 May 1998-->
<!-- ADJUSTED = 2 August 1998-->
<!-- REVAMP = 6 September 1998-->
<!-- ADJUSTED = 27 October 1998-->
<!-- ADJUSTED = 2 November 1998-->

Many documents are tweaked lots of times without any mention in the newsletter.

If you have something that you think fits the theme of Dark Skies, try contacting me and finding out. :-)

If you want to swap links and appear on the Dark Skies links page, email me and try sorting something out. I want to put a description underneath every link to tell people where they're going, so make sure your site can have a good description. :-)

I'm especially interested in New Zealand related astronomy sites. There don't seem to be very many of them.