24 November 2005

Today has been a lousy Thanksgiving Day as far as the weather goes.  It was rainy overnight and at least dried off for the parade but has turned rainy again and even sounds like thunder right now but it is hard to tell about that through my thermal insulated windows.  They had been predicting some snow flurries today but I don't see any mention of them -- or much rain for that matter -- in the NOAA 72 hour observed conditions report for Central Park.  I had hoped to go to CSP tonight to observe the occultation of σ Leonis but it does not look like the weather will be conducive for that.  The temperature is supposed to drop to 22°F by daybreak with a wind chill of 9°F.  Winds are supposed to gust to 41 mph around midnight and be pretty constant at 15-20 mph until after sunrise.  More importantly the satellite and radar images are showing lots of cloud over the northeast.

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Peter sent a link to an astronomy Web page that had some information of map projections.  The guy is using JavaScript to create them so it is way beyond me.  But they have a trial version of some software that maps the active regions of the sun.  It is called Active Region Explorer and is pretty interesting.

The software works in real time to get information about the various sun regions so you need an active Internet connection to use it.

As you can see from the above reduced size screen capture, the bottom graph is off my screen and there is no scroll bar to get down to view it. Each active region of the sun has a dot placed at its location and if it is a sunspot it is accompanied with a pie chart that provides information on the region.

While you watch the screen you sometimes can see these little charts change as new data is downloaded.  The bar graphs on the right of the screen are also constantly being updated.  The colors used on the chart do not exactly match those on the legend (green in particular) and there are no black bars separating the wedges so it takes a little bit of interpretation at first.

The program is very slow.  They recommend a 2 GHz processor and at least 512 MB of RAM.  I have a 14. GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM but still have to wait when I mouse over anything for something to happen.  It can spends about 40 seconds out of every minute getting new information from the Web and this may be causing some of the slowness.  

This program probably provides more information that I need to know and am currently capable of interpreting, but having the graphics showing where the spots are and which ones are growing and shrinking will be handy.  And I will now be able to mark my sketches to show where the solar north pole really is.

A 30-day trial version of the program can be downloaded from rayben systems, inc: Vern's Astronomy Weblog.  Being a software junkie I got a copy.

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I am experimenting with a  Content Management System (CMS) to write my blog entries.  The one I am using is a freeware program I found somewhere called Nvu (http://www.nvu.com/).  I have always written my HTML by hand in Notepad because I could control the way it was formatted and it was easier for me to edit it.  Nvu has a WYSIWYG feature that allows you to just type and let it take care of the HTML.  It will apply formatting of my choice and does spell checking.

I am not sure that this will work for everything I do.  It is not working with my occultation map web pages.  And I am not sure how it is going to deal with my multiple nested tables structure in this blog.  But for straight text it is good.  It will ensure that my comments go between the correct tags as in the HTML view it shows table boxes.  And it should cut down on time searching for missing or incomplete tags as its HTML is always valid even if I have done something that isn't -- it corrects it.  And it appears to learn my style.  It likes to use two line breaks to create a paragraph while I use a paragraph tag.  So after I went in and edited a couple of paragraphs it learned to end a paragraph with a paragraph end tag and start the next with a paragraph tag.  It can deal with CSS so if I could also I would be able to configure it to always use that style to end my paragraphs.

Nvu is supposed to allow live edits on a remote server and direct posting to the server but I don't think that will work with Blogger.  For the time being anyway, it is going to be a type here and paste there type of operation.

Well, it turns out it isn't as good as it looks at first. I had to go to the Source view and copy the HTML from there to paste it into Blogger. Nvu creates lines of text, at least in its out of the box configuration, only as long as the display window. But blogger interprets hard returns literally so I got a lot of short lines of text here and had to go through and edit out all of them