Excellent resources for hard-SF writers

Solstation.com has some great resourses for hard-SF writers. As the site says, "SolStation.com provides information and software for those interested in astronomy and in writing, education, or entertainments related to science or speculative fiction."

Solstation's database of stars is tremendously useful; my current novel involves Sigma Draconis, and I got a lot of the info there.

Also way cool is the free ChView software (the name is short for CherryhView, referring to my friend, writer C.J. Cherryh), which produces three dimensional star maps, showing how the stars in the local universe are positioned relative to each other; I made great use of this back in 1999 when I was plotting the multilegged flightplan of the starship Merelcas (named, incidentally, for my friend Merle Casci, the wife of Toronto SF writer Terence M. Green) in my novel Calculating God.