9 November 2005

It was lousy weather tonight so I decided to work off some of the backlog of field drawings for the blog. The last ones I did were in mid-June.

Previously I had been printing up a page with a computer generated circle of the correct size to fit in the blog column and redrawing the diagram. The cleaned up diagram was then scanned and resized again to make sure it would fit. This was a time consuming process and I now have nearly five months of diagrams to process (make that four months since the weather was lousy last month and not much observing got done) So I decided to just scan the sketches in the field notes and get them uploaded and be done with it. Some (no, most) of them aren't very pretty, but they will at least be there.

So far I have gotten all of June completed and have finished scanning the first half of July. In the process I have come across three days of notes that appear to never have been transcribed into the blog.

---

I love Planetarium for the Palm as an in-the-field star atlas. It is one of the few star atlases I have. Most of the atlases don't go much deeper than the naked-eye stars and that isn't deep enough for use with my binoculars or telescope. With the new version of Planetarium I have an atlas that is convenient to use and goes all the way down to Mag 16.

The major drawback to Planetarium is that the area above and below the map is illuminated white space. I don't worry a llot about dark adaptation with the street lights and Parks and police cars driving past us all night but when I am out at a dark sky sight I would like to be able to tone down my display.

I had been a beta tester for an application launcher for the Palm that skinned the device and I had a green theme that toned the display down a little but it was still bright. But the last time I had to cold reset my palm none of my add on programs came back and I haven't found an old copy of the PIlauncher on my hard drive and they have disappeared from the Web. And this time around I don't seem to be able to adjust the brightness of the display at all.

Planetarium has an option for night mode, but it is like going back too the old Palm Pilot days when you got black letters on a green screen or the early Grid pen computers that had a plasma screen that used red text on a black background. Everything in Planetarium gets turned red -- the test, the stars, the constellation lines, the Cartesian grid -- everything.

So I started playing around with Khroma. It is a program that will let you change how almost any portion of your screen looks. I tried various color themes suggested by Khroma and found one based on blues that wasn't too bad. Thinking I could do better with deep reds I created a night mode theme that I really like.

I found that when I leave Planetarium set to normal display mode and use my Khroma night mode theme I get a black collar around the map with red text, but the objects on the map still maintain their color attributes making the map much easier to read.

N.B. I set my scanner up to scan slides and put the Palm on it to get these images. The scanned images were very dark and were tweaked during scanning and again in Photoshop. The images don't agree exactly with what I see on my PDA screen in regard to brightness, contrast and satureation. But they represent the advantage that is to be had in teaming Planetarium up with Khroma.

---

Having just finished reading Descartes' Secret Notebooks I started in at dinner tonight on The Planets by Dava Sobel. I haven't gotten very far in it but so far it is easy reading and had made the cosmological concepts it covered understandable to even me. I think it will make a good introduction to planetary science for the non-astronomer.

There is a chapter for each of the planets except Uranus which is lumped in with Neptune. Pluto is still there but I don't know yet what she has to say about it. The newest planet wasn't discovered soon enough to stop the presses. There are also chapters on the Sun and Moon.

I hope it comes in the chapter on Pluto, but so far there is no mention of the fact that nobody really knows what a planet is. It is like the Justice said about pornography: he couldn't define it but he knew it when he saw it. Absent an accepted definition of the term planet, personal interpretations of what the term planet should mean is why Pluto is no longer a planet at the American Museum of Natural History while it is everywhere else.