The Hong Kong Space Museum has been publishing the Astrocalendar since 1983. Before long, its annual publication has become a tradition of the Space Museum that blends splendid artistry with rich scientific contents. Time flies and a quarter of century has passed. During these 25 years, we witnessed an ever-accelerating pace in the development of science and technology, which culminates in the advent of personal computing and the popularisation of the Internet, and brings changes to our daily lives that were never spoken of. In the past, finding planetary positions calls for gleaning through astronomical almanacs, not to mention those tedious and complex calculations that were frequently required. Today, we just need a simple click to access this kind of information through powerful yet easily available personal computers. In view of this, the Space Museum decided to produce an Astro e-calendar which would be endowed with features not previously possible with traditional calendars. We sincerely wish that general users would find the Astro e-calendar well suit their needs, and stargazers would use the calendar as a handy tool for doing astronomy outdoors.

2008 Astro e-calendar
The test version of 2008 Astro e-calendar is now available for free download. Among the novel feature of the e-calendar, the most prominent ones are to calculate the rise, set and transit times of the Sun, Moon and the eight planets, as well as display their real-time position in the sky (at present only their altitude, refreshed every 10 seconds, is shown). More nifty features, such as showing planetary magnitudes may be incorporated in future versions after soliciting user feedback. For suggestions or bug reports, please email to astrocalendar@hk.space.museum. 

Downloading and Installation
The format of the e-calendar is a bit special in its own right. Instead of being a full-fledged calendar application we come across in the Internet from time to time, it is a browser plugin written in javascript, html and xml, etc. It enjoys the advantages of being slim and utilising only a little resources, rendering it unlikely to become a resource hog. However, at the present moment only the web browser “Opera” possesses the built-in engine that can run such kind of plugins. In the future we wish to provide versions that support well-known browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

The steps to download and install the plugin are as follows:
1. Go to website "www.opera.com" to download the latest version of Opera,  the current version of which is 9.25.
2. Click here to download the 2008 Astro e-calendar zip file. Unzip the contents of the file to any folder of your choice.
3. Run Opera. On the top menu bar select "File". Choose "Open" in the drop down menu and navigate to the file "config.xml" in the folder you created in (2). The e-calendar will appear and can be placed to wherever you like by drag-and-drop. You may use its functions with the three buttons at the upper right corner of the interface.
4. You can now minimize, but not close,  the Opera Window. The e-calendar should now reside on your computer desktop.

That's it! Simple, eh?