Well, sort of. This past week Mrs. Skyhound has been away at a conference and the Skyhound kids are out of school. Between feeding them, clothing them, taking them to their baseball games, following both the Stanley Cup and Louis Vuitton Cup finals with them, and separating the two of them when they fight, I haven't had a lot of time to work.
Nonetheless there have been some important milestones. In addition to working in here and there the tying up of little loose ends, I added even more improved data to the planetary nebula database (it's really looking good).
But the big news is that I finished the end-to-end testing of the new stellar database and it passed with flying colors. The final count was 16,330,450 stars, including over 50,000 variables and 72,089 multiple star systems. I don't have a final count for the total number of double-star pairs, but it is likely close to 100,000. I also ran many tests on special cases, such as the long-period binary pair BL Cet and UV Cet, Barnard's star, etc. Everything is go.
It was time to start creating the full database for the "pro" version, which will add large numbers of faint stars down to magnitude 20. There are a total of 24 declination bands, of which 3 are now complete. At the current rate it looks like it may take a week running continuously to finish the database, bringing the total number of stars to something around 250 million. SkyTools is really impressive when targeted in the bands already completed. It seems like you can zoom in forever and the stars just keep coming!
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4 comments:
Sounds excellent Greg - it'll be great to have a planning and visualization tool which goes deeper than I can image, so I can identify everything in one of my images.
John
Hi John -- yep, that's the idea. The "pro" version of ST3 is primarily meant to support imaging.
Greg, a question: what will be the magnitude limit for complete coverage in the pro version? (i.e., at what magnitude are you assured of having all stars brighter than that in the pro database?)
Hi Marc -- the pro version database will typically be complete to magnitude 17-17.5.
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