Affiliation
Astronomical Society of South Australia (ASSAU)
Wed, 05/13/2015 - 09:18
When submitting a DSLR photometry observation just now I noticed that the Airmass and Scintillation Calculator link in the window that opens when clicking the airmass help link is broken.
I obtain airmass from a spreadsheet so it's not a problem, but I wondered whether this calculator may be useful to others (or myself at some point) and whether it still exists.
David (BDJB)
If you need an online airmass calculator before the AAVSO one gets fixed, I usually use
http://www.briancasey.org/artifacts/astro/airmass.cgi
which is an implementation of algorithms written by John Thorstensen.
Arne
Hi David,
I'm looking at the perlscript cgi code that used to provide that utility on the old (old, old) website, and the code itself has a note saying it isn't working. Apparently that was broken before 2010, but was so infrequently used that no one fixed it. You seem to be the first to notice it and point it out in a long time!
The most efficient thing would be to use the external link Arne pointed out. If this is a feature we'd like to bring back we can put it into our schedule of things to work on.
Matthew
Thanks Arne, Matthew.
The Perl CGI could probably be easily converted into a purely client-side JavaScript page if necessary. As Matt says, pointing to the one Arne uses is probably enough.
David
I've modified that help box to point to Brian Casey's website rather than to the broken link.
Thanks to David for pointing it out to us!
TA, as of version 2.37, provides airmass calculations which appear on the Extinction tab after you process your data. You need to provide your observation location either in the extended format record (as #OBSLON= and #OBSLAT=) or explicitly on the Extinction tab.
- The airmass computations are included in the result comment/note field as |VX= , |CX= and |KX= , the airmasses of V, comp and check stars.
- If your records do not include data in the AMASS field, TA will fill in that field with the computed airmass for the target
- If you activate the extinction computations then it will use the appropriate airmass for star and comp extinction comps.
Based on user feedback I can either always override the submitted AMASS with the computed star airmass or provide a switch.
George
-
Hi,
Due to Nova Sgr 2015 No 2, I ended up writting a piece of code in JavaScript to help me cope with extinction. One particular source file might be usefull if you plan to provide a javascript based tool on the website:
https://bitbucket.org/herr_alien/astronomical-extinction/src/3809333b9f…
I'm ok with licensing this particular file as MIT, if the Affero GPL sounds too scary (don't see why, since the person using the tool does end up with the source code of the tool anyway :) ).
Regards,
Alex.
------------------------------- edited ------------------------------
I renamed the repo, the corrected link is this one:
https://bitbucket.org/herr_alien/extinction-o-meter/src/e2b0b27241d1125…