18 November 2007

I created a list of 17P/Holmes comparison stars brighter than Mag 4 but dimmer than Mag. 2 and copied it into my scratchpad, formatted so that I can fold over the edge of the page to hide the magnitude listing so I am not swayed by it when I make my observations. That is only good for one use, so I created a web page with the same data that I can print out whenever I need it.

Then I came across my old HP 95LX palntop computer. I loved that machine back in the early 90s, until the keyboard started to go bad. It had a reasonable text editor and a pared-down version of Lotus 1-2-3. I used to write some major documents and huge spreadsheets on that little machine. At the time I was very good at writing Lotus 1-2-3 macros. I put new batteries in it and it still works, so I created a spreadsheet to enter my 17P/Holmes observations into. Then I was rearranging books and came across all of my old 95LX magazines so I looked through them to get a refresher on Macros. Now that spreadsheet will

• Convert the local time to UT. It sounds simple until you try to trap the rollover at the end of the day.
• Calculate my magnitude estimate.
• Calculate my diameter estimate.
• Reformat the star list from target order into magnitude order to make it easier to write the blog entry.
• Graph the results to identify exceptions I need to flag in the blog.

If I had the software and all of the dongles, and if Windows Vista liked the device, I think I could export the data into 1-2-3 or Excel on my laptop and have it export a text file with most of the HTML tags. For now it will just be nice having the machine sort the stars by magnitude. That will be a major time saver.