Progress and Frustration

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post. There's been quite a lot going on. My family has kept me very busy as the school year winds down and I've had a nasty cold. So far my progress report for this month is a mixed bag: things have been going slower than I'd like, yet I have undeniably moved forward toward that ever brightening light at the end of the tunnel.

For a while there it seemed like things were moving at a snail's pace and I was pretty frustrated. I bitterly recalled claiming here that making the chart cursor ignore objects when the shift key is depressed would take "two minutes." So I decided to time myself. Sure enough, it only took 1:45 from opening the editor to testing it successfully. But before I drew too much satisfaction, I realized that I needed to add the same code to two other charts, meaning it would in fact take three times longer than I had estimated!

Sigh.

I turned most my attention to the observing lists, adding a bunch of new columns. It seems like not a day goes by that I don't add a new one. In fact, I thought of a new one last night that I need to add today. This is one of those annoying things that appear as one item on my ToDo list, yet like a cosmic ray explodes into a shower of little items to be checked off. The most time consuming part isn't changing the code, it's coming up with nice-looking icons for the columns that require them. For instance, I spent a lot of time on the observing priority and observing status icons. For the status I ended up with a little Keck dome open to the night sky for objects that need observation, and a daytime shot of the dome closed for objects that have been observed. They look nice but I'm not sure I like them.

The priority icons are just awful. I hate them! So I'll have to try another approach, maybe simply going with the numbers 1, 2, and 3. I dislike wasting time on such trivialities, but in the end it's often the little details that count the most and the problem with being near the end is that you can't put them off any longer. Fortunately I like how the 5-star ratings came out.

One thing that's satisfying is making a little leap of insight. I had a customer email me some time ago with regard to the needs of imagers, and I read what he wrote but didn't really get what he meant through my sometimes rather thick skull. Fortunately while I was looking into imaging from the "what can I compute?" point of view I had a tiny epiphany: it's great to know what your chances of detecting an object tonight are, but it's even better to compare that to the best circumstances. And that applies to visual observing too. In other words, if tonight detecting M98 is "challenging" it's immensely useful to know that on another night it may in fact be "easy." So I added a new column that tells you how easy the object is to detect on a the best night for comparison. Unfortunately it takes up quite a bit of screen real estate. So I'm adding a new column with little colored-circle icons that summarizes the comparison: green means that tonight the object is at prime visibility, yellow means it is degraded somewhat, and red means wait for another night. And yes, this is pretty much what had been suggested (smacks forehead with palm).

I've also been working on the deep sky databases. It turns out that the LMC globular clusters were missing. Being an ignorant northerner, I didn't even realize there were LMC globulars! The source catalog I used was for Milky Way clusters (duh). Some are quite bright and nice, for those far enough south to observe them. I've also added the MASH planetary nebulae and updated positions and magnitudes for other planetaries. I'm currently working on the open cluster database, primarily improving positions. Fortunately the databases are going fairly quickly.

That's NGC 2210, a "new" LMC globular cluster above.

Anyhow, like I said it's a mixed bag to report: I've had to let go of the idea of starting the beta test at the beginning of June, but on the other hand things are moving along without any more major setbacks. I'm not going to try to predict anymore when It'll be ready to start testing other than to say it will be this summer for sure.