[sac-forum] Stellar evolution software

In regard to AJ Crayon's interesting talk at the SAC meeting last Friday....
Here are URLs for an interesting PC software program, "StarClock", giving an animated version of the "Hertzsprung-Russell" diagram: 
http://www.seds.org/~spider/sclock.html
http://leo.astronomy.cz/sclock/sclock.html

To quote "Spider" Frommert on the SEDS pages:
>>IMHO it is really a nice demonstration tool ! I recommend it to everyone who would like to get some feeling of the relative time scales for the various phases of stellar evolution for stars with different masses -- it is actually surprising (even if you longly [sic] know that) to visualize how short the massive stars live, how short stars are living as giants, and how fast they cross the HRD in critical phases.<<
It is interesting to run the StarClock program and note the rapidity with which stars make the transition from each of the phases of the evolutionary stages to the next. The program shows the transitions in a representative time scale, which is otherwise somewhat difficult to appreciate fully.
This page by Dr. Jim Kaler (an outstanding author on stars) gives a good deal of information on the H-R diagram and various classes of stars plotted on it: 
http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/hrd.html
And more information is given here, including H-R diagrams shown in color:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzsprung-Russell

Cheers,
Gene Lucas
(17250)

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