That's a good point Acrimonious. In fact I use the star names in my system more as a page holder than a pointing angle. This is because the beam of my antenna is so large (3.6 degrees) and the drive motors are so inaccurate (about 2 degrees) that to say I am pointing at a star is rather disingenuous. People with access to large antennas have the benefit of smaller beam width, down to a few arc seconds, but then pay the price of looking at one star when a signal might be being transmitted from its next door neighbor. Don’t mistake me; if someone offered me a 40 foot steerable dish that I could operate and live in it, like a modern light keeper I would jump at the chance (…wife might have a problem with that…).

I have a set of favorite stars that I look at. These are from a list of 25 HabStars (stars that have planets and have a chance of harboring life) that was published by Margaret Turnbull in 2004. I have winnowed the list down to 12 that I can position my antenna to sometime during the day or night. You can see the list here:
http://www.seti.net/html/SETINet/Archive/Archive.htm
Sometimes when one of the HabStars is not in my antennas view I switch, almost at a whim, to one of the other stars in my archive – like Alnitak.

I understand what you are saying about music and for the most part I agree with you except that I am reading Daniel Dennett (one of my heroes) who is a researcher on the philosophy of mind and what he says about music makes me reconsider my original opinion that our love of music is completely learned. It may be built into our genes somehow. Remember my point about looking for ourselves? One of the things that make us Us is our love of music.

I also understand the comment, I think it was in Off-Topic, about ‘good ol’boring sonification of data, by poster Daniel but I was looking through one of my favorite books called ‘Envisioning Information’ by Edward Tufte and in it he shows a passion for numbers shown visually. He tells of his love (I really mean love not like) for the way numbers can be made to come alive at the hands of a talented composer of charts and graphs. Could it be that sonification of data collected from radio telescopes is like that as well? I don’t know for sure but why not.

My system uses something not far from that. I convert signals I receive to images because I think that the human eye/mind can detect images quicker and more accurately than a computer can. The JPGs that my system generates are all examined by me before I accept a ‘Hit’ decision by my software. I can quickly chuck out local signals this way.

So who knows the best way to look and to find. I like the old joke:
Late one night, a drunk guy is crawling around under a lamppost. A cop comes up and asks him what he's doing.
"I'm looking for my keys," the drunk says. "I lost them about three blocks away."
"So why aren't you looking for them where you dropped them?" the cop asks.
The drunk looks at the cop, amazed that he'd ask so obvious a question. "Because the light is better here."

That is effect what I am doing – looking where the light is best.

Good thinking with you… Jim