It's October!

October is a great month to:

1.  Read John Bellairs books

Last month I bought a complete set of John Bellairs books on eBay:

It's a set of 28 books, all first editions, and 20 of them have artwork by Edward Gorey.  They are fantastically creepy.  I've put up photos of each book with Gorey artwork here.

If you're not sure where to start, try his most famous book, The House with a Clock in its Walls.

2.  Read the Monstrumologist series

The third book in the series, The Isle of Blood, came out last month.  We both read it and loved it. It's the best one so far, and is beautifully and gorgeously written.  The series is literary horror for young adults, with heavy emphasis on literary.  And it's classic horror, ala Frankenstein, not horror-movie horror.  The books are fantastic.  You must read them!  I've written about the first two books here and here.

3.  Watch The Man Who Wasn't There

This is one of my favorite movies, and every time October rolls around I want to watch it.  I have no idea why, because there's nothing at all creepy or Autumn-like about it.  It's about a barber in the late 1940's who becomes involved in a blackmail scheme leading to murder.  But it's shot in black-and-white, has beautiful cinematography, and is very moody and atmospheric.

Wendy and I first saw this movie purely by accident when it was released.  We went to see the movie From Hell, but the opening scene was too gruesome for Wendy to watch, so we walked out and wandered the theater's hallways until we found another movie that was about to start.  It was The Man Who Wasn't There.

4.  Star-gaze

In the southern sky, look for Fomalhaut (FOE-mal-oh).  Because there are no other bright stars near it, it's been called the Lonely Star of Autumn.  It's also orbited by a planet, which has been directly photographed by Hubble.

Also keep an eye out for Algol.  It's a binary star, and about every 3 nights it dims dramatically because the fainter star eclipses the brighter star.  This periodic dimming/brightening earned it the name Demon Star.

5.  Watch college football

Of course, any month is a great month to watch college football!

Star Odyssey

I released an Android app this week called Star Odyssey.  It's available in the Android Market for devices running Android 2.1 or higher.

Way back when I was shopping for a new smartphone, there was one main reason why I wanted an Android phone:  Google Sky Map.  It's an Android app that seems like magic.  You go out at night, hold the phone up to the sky, and it shows you a map of the stars for the exact region of sky you're looking at.  Stars are labeled and constellations are drawn.  As you move the phone around, the map moves with you, so it's always showing the same section of sky you're looking at.  The app doesn't have to be used at night either; you can use it to see what stars are above the horizon during the day.

After I got my Android phone, I spent a number of evenings outside using the app to identify stars and constellations.  It worked as advertised.  When I've shown Google Sky Map to other people, everyone is just as amazed as I was when I first saw it in action.  The app is just plain cool.

But after using it for a while, I wanted more.  The app shows star names and constellation names, but that's it.  I remember last year, on an incredibly cold Thanksgiving night in Oklahoma, showing the app to Cory and identifying the star Procyon.  I wanted to know what kind of star it was, what the name meant, why it got that name, and even just how to pronounce it.

I looked for an app that would give me that information, but came up empty.  So I decided to write one.  The result is Star Odyssey, which is a star guide with details on over 60 of the brightest stars (the same stars that are labeled in Google Sky Map).  It includes a pronunciation guide, details on each star including its brightness and distance from Earth, and it even integrates with another app (called SkEye) that lets you search for and find the star in the sky.

Finally, here's a sample of what Star Odyssey has to say about the star Procyon:

• It's the 8th brightest star in the night sky, and is only 11 light years from Earth.
• It's a binary star system.
• Procyon forms one point of the Winter Triangle.  Sirius and Betelgeuse are the other two.
• It's pronounced "PRO-see-on".
• In northern latitudes, Procyon always rises before Sirius, the Dog Star.  As a result, the star got the name Procyon because it comes from a Greek word meaning "before the dog".

There's other cool stuff I learned while making this app.  More on that later.