Astronomical Timer

[sheeny (Al)]

Guys this is just a little teaser to see how much interest there is in this little project.

It's an Astronomical Event Timer for those who have PC's in their observatories or take laptops into the field. Of course, it's only as accurate as your PC clock, but if you ensure it's synchronised before and after the session that shouldn't be too bad.

It will record UTC and local time for each event as well as elapsed time from the first event on the log.

There are two methods for measuring your personal equation: one for predictable events (i.e. that may be anticipated) such as the contact of a moon with the limb of a planet/moon/sun; and the other for unpredictable events that you must see before reacting (such as reappearance of a star).

The timing log and PE data can be saved to file for further editting and presentation with a wordprocessor of your choice (when I finish the code for that ). I'll also write a note file / web page explaining how to correctly apply the PE data to the timing data.

It's been another interesting little coding project if nothing else. Got the old grey matter swilling about again!

If people are interested I'll post a copy when I finish the file save routine.

Al.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

That's be great Al. As you can see I still have a few spaces left on my desktop

[sheeny (Al)]

Have you gone to small icons yet? and maxed out your screen resolution???

You can always add a second video card and screen!!!!

Al.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

I'm working on it. I need a bigger hard drive though, I'm running out of room on my C: drive (partition) and I don't want to give up my D:. Gotta keep at least 13 gig for imaging nights

[sheeny (Al)]

OK guys, here's a new toy to play with if you are interested in timing astronomical events and you have a PC or laptop with you when you observe.

It has been written in Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition, so if you are not running the .NET framework on your PC it will want to connect to the internet to download some support files when you install it. If you don't want to or can't install those files I suggest you don't download it.

Hopefully it is pretty self explanatory to run. It can record UTC and Local time of astro events and also the elapsed time between them.

It has two Personal Equation (PE) measurement routines built in as well. For the newbies, your PE is a measure of your reaction time. The two different PE measurement routines measure your PE for predictable and unpredictable events. An unpredictable event is something you have to see before you can react to it, such as a star emerging from behind the moon. A predictable event is one your can watch approaching, so you can anticipate it. Depending on the events you are observing you may need just one or both of these PE's to be evaluated and recorded.

Now why go to so much trouble with your PE?

The most likely time that the event occurred is the time recorded in the log minus your mean reaction time. The accuracy of your measurement will be plus or minus the Range of your reaction times. The Range was calculated statistically - that's why you measure your PE 30 times for each calculator!

The most likely elapsed time between any two events is calculated by subtracting the PE for the second event and adding the PE for the first event. If they are the same type of event, it cancels out!

The accuracy of the elapsed time is plus or minus the sum of the Ranges for the start and finish times. So for the same type of event, the accuracy is plus or minus 2 x Range. If they are different events the accuracy is plus or minus (Range1 + Range2).

All this maths still has to be done after the event, but the program measures and records all your times and PE statistics for you, and lets you save them to a text file that you can later edit and present as desired.

Have a play. I'm interested in your feedback.

Al.

[sheeny (Al)]

Just added it to my website and included a ReadMe file in the .zip file. The web page also describes it, and how to use it, etc.

http://alsworld.topcities.com/astro/AlsTimer.htm

Al.