2006-10-27

You could fill a book... Part II

Something I forgot to mention in my previous entry is the fact that last night's session saw me filling my second log book — it's taken since since January this year to do that.

Just another little arbitrary milestone that's worth remembering...

File Under: Logbooks, Milestones, Amateur Astronomy.

3 comments:

Tag said...

I took a stroll through your logs - nice reporting and a very effective interface to get to the data.
Additionally, I am surprised by your observing site's sky quality. For some reason I thought you were in bright, urban skies.
I always enjoy your work.
--peter

Dave Pearson said...

Thanks Peter.

The logging system I've got in place does have some problems that I want to sort out in the long term. The biggest muck-up being that, when I started with this, I didn't envision having multiple sessions in a single day (I really should have considered the idea of solar observing).

The system would work a lot better if I'd thought to use the same naming scheme you do for your logs (not just the date but the date and time of the start of the session).

Still, even though it's a little clumsy it works most of the time and I can generally find stuff I'm looking for.

As for my skies, yeah, I can't complain, they're not too bad. I've got a couple of lights that shine directly into my garden but there's not too much light pollution in the village.

Tag said...

Hi Dave,

Reading your wiki_log was informative. If I read it properly I see that you created wrapper to contain the sessions. All the markup language and programming is foreign to me so I need time to digest it. One thing that I note from your logs is that one can search on sessions or an object. However, the object seems tightly coupled with the session, such that if I select [View All], all the data of the observing sessions loads, not just the data for the object of interest. A use of this would be to compare your multiple observations side by side.
The classification of objects is very useful and at a glance one can see what you've seen and how often.
I checked out Peter Chapin's logbook which I liked. It is not as dynamic as yours, perhaps dimensional is a better a word, but still useful in that he has gotten them databased.

Altogether your observing logs are something that I wish my logbook could evolve to. It goes without saying that features like the hyperlinks of the object names into SEDS website for object details are great utility.

Thanks, peter