This month:
- Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars
- Famous Perseids star shower
- Andromeda Galaxy, Ring Nebula
- and many other items...
Read more...
Star chart (approx. 0:00 local sun time): Planets:Venus(W), Mars, Saturn - in the evening Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune - after midnight Vesta (asteroid) - in the evening, not Mars and Saturn. Vesta is about 7 - 7.5m, so it can be observed only with telescope (taking into account its western position).  Venus passes at 2 degrees south to Mars on July, 10th Moon:Last quarter - Sun, 4thNew moon - Mon, 12thFirst quarter - Sun, 18thFull moon - Mon, 26thMoon passes at 4 degrees nothern to Neptune on July, 1stMoon passes at 6 degrees nothern to Uranus on July, 3nd(~19:00)Moon passes at 7 degrees nothern to Jupiter on July, 3nd(~23:00)Moon passes at 4 degrees south to Regulus on July, 14thMoon passes at 5 degrees south to Venus on July, 15thMoon passes at 6 degrees south to Mars on July, 16th(~5:00)Moon passes at 7 degrees south to Jupiter on July, 16th(~18:00)Moon passes at 7 degrees south to Spica on July,18thConstellations:S - "Summer Triangle" - Lyra, Cygnus, Aquila (Vega, Altair, Deneb) S - Saggitarius E - Pegasus, Andromeda, Cassiopea, Cepheus W - Bootes, Corona Borealis, NE - Perseus, Auriga NW - Ursa Major, Herciles T(op) - Draco  (NEW SECTION!) Star showers:July 28, 29 - Southern Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower. The Delta Aquarids can produce about 20 meteors per hour at their peak. The shower usually peaks on July 28 & 29, but some meteors can also be seen from July 18 - August 18. The radiant point for this shower will be in the constellation Aquarius. Best viewing is usually to the east after midnight. Starts on Mon, 12Ends on Aug, 19Sat, 17 - Perseids shower begins its activity. (Peak on Aug, 12-13) Interesting:Comet McNaught(C/2009 R1). On July 2, newly discovered comet McNaught makes its closest approach to the Sun. It will be visible in the early morning sky just before dawn for several weeks before and will grow gradually brighter as July 2 approaches. Make sure you find a dark location far away from city lights. The comet will appear as a dim, fuzzy spot of light. A good pair of binoculars will really help to make it clearly visible. It is too early to tell if the comet will grow a tail visible to the naked eye. July 11 - Total Solar Eclipse. The path of totality will only be visible in the southern Pacific Ocean, Easter Island, and parts of southern Chile and Argentina. A partial eclipse will be visible in many parts of southern South America. 
The first time I encountered with Joomla 1.6 was about a year ago. Then I tried one of the alphas (don't remember, which exactly). That alpha was much like 1.5, but with refactored(nested and customizable) categories and user groups - things that I had always wanted in Joomla!
So beta3 impressed me enough. There is a lot of work done, and I can say that now I like Joomla! even more!
They have completely refactored administrator menu, and made it more intuitive. For instance, all things related to site - configuration, maintenance, cache purge, system info - are grouped in the Site menu. Similarly, everything related to users is grouped in Users menu, etc...
There are many new features added to the configuration, for instance, an option for choosing transliteration or unicode alias for non-latin article names. A new tab appeared, for setting permissions to user groups.
They have improved the usability a lot. There's at last Save and New button! This really can shorten the number of unnecessary clicks when adding content to the site. As well user interface is more friendly now to a newbie: there's no apply button. It's now called Save. And the other button is called Save and Close. Wonderful! (I'm tired of explaining the difference between this two buttons to customers).
Extensinon manager tabs now are: Install, Update, Manage, Discover, Warnings. no comments
As well admin panel has new design, which seems so fresh after using 1.5's Khepri. Unfortunately, the screenshots cannot completely reproduce the feeling from working with Joomla, so you'd better try it yourself.

However, because of the Beta status, there's a number of issues yet. I was ubable to login to administration after install until I used standart jos_ table prefix. It's impossible to save Global configuration :) There are other issues, but I'm not going to list them all. It's beta, and all of them are supposed to be corrected in the stable version.
So, I'm looking forward to it. :)
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