More work on my logs

Over the past few days I've been playing some more with the electronic version of my logs (the weather's been rather unkind of late). The main change is that I've been extending the mini-markup. On top of the markup for things like Messier objects (plus the NGC and Caldwell markup that I added a while back) I've now added markup for equipment, star, const (for constellations), filter, planet and jovian (for the moons of Jupiter, obviously).

Initially the idea is to provide a method of marking up text that can be turned into links when I convert the source XML for a log into XHTML but, in the long term, the idea is that this markup will be useful for creating different types of index into the logs and also to provide a method of searching the source XML.

As an example (taken from this observation):

<ul>
  <li><star>HIP42184</star></li>
  <li><star>Upsilon2 Cancri</star></li>
  <li><star>Upsilon1 Cancri</star></li>
  <li><star>HIP41660</star></li>
  <li><star>28 Cancri</star></li>
  <li><star>24 Cancri</star></li>
</ul>

The resulting XHTML has links to various places relating to the stars that I mention:

• HIP42184 (Aladin view)


• Upsilon2 Cancri


• Upsilon1 Cancri


• HIP41660 (Aladin view)


• 28 Cancri


• 24 Cancri

The links are created with some XSLT files, the hard work being done with Sablotron.

The nice thing about this is that the logs will be a little quicker to type up (compared to having to hand-input the links), I get the links in my log pages "for free" (in other words I don't have to go looking them up each time I type up a log), if I want to change the way a whole set of links work I've only got to change one file (the xsl file) and I'm also starting to build up a useful markup for future searching and indexing needs.

Doubtless I'm solving a "problem" that other people solved a long time ago, but it's nice to have a cross over between hacking on a computer and astronomy.

File Under: Astronomy and XML, Observing Logs, Astronomy Log Formats.