First, many thanks to all who have replied so far - your collective encouragement really is very heartening. :^)

Second, on that constellation names job ... it didn't, or hasn't yet, become a module as such, but it did act as an important step to my better understanding what packages and modules really were.

The short version is it didn't need to be a module for what I wanted to do - I just pulled it in as a text file and created the needed hash programmatically rather than by hard coding it in - for me, at my level, a real step up.

Now, whether this + other astro info could become a useful module one day ... I hope so. I just started dipping into module creation a few days ago. I'll definitely post progress ...

And I got much clearer on the nature of packages with the help of some monks here and from Damian Conway's OOPerl book. GB