Stars less than magnitude 4?

Davoud:
Exactly my point. My wife and I have been truck farmers, but we didn't
build our own tractors.

Paul Schlyter
I'm surprised you even drove them -- there are drivers who can drive them
for you...

I can tell that you're a person who wakes up in the morning surprised
by a hell of a lot of things.

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

In article , says...

Paul Schlyter:
Should people refrain from making their own notes too? There are
already so many books out there, so nobody needs to write anything
more .... right?

As usual, you missed it by a mile. Writing an original thought or an
original book

....and how do you know your thoughts are so original? Far from every
thought is unique, in most cases others have been thinking similar
thoughts earlier, probably even before you were born.

is not analogous to writing a piece of software that
scores, if not hundreds, of people have already written, and that some
are even making available for free.

Ok mr wiseguy, please provide a link to a piece of free software which
produces a table with alt+az of all stars down to mag 4 at regular time
intervals (say once an hour) for any location of my choice.

You didn't find such software instantly, right? It takes some effort to
locate it, if it exists. If the effort of locating it exceeds the effort
of writing such software yourself, then it makes sense to write your own
code, even if hundreds of others already has written similar code.

A visual comparison of these
programs will reveal that the number of ways in which this data can be
presented is quite limited if it is to be a useful analogue of the
night sky. But you go ahead and write a better one and get it on the
market before the next New Moon, and I'll buy a copy.

Better one? Market? Buy? ?????????????????????????????????????????

You completely miss the point. This code needs not be better than other
similar pieces of code, it merely needs to be good enough to fullfill
someones (mine, or yours, or someone elses) needs. It's not intended for
any market, and you won't be able to buy it since you won't even know
that it exists. Writing such code will take perhaps 1/100'th of the time
it would take to write code for a marketable product. Yep, that's the way
it is: perhaps 1% of a software developer's time is spent on the core
problem, the remaining 99% is spent on nice-looking "wrapping" to make
the product marketable. If you write a piece of code just for your own
use, you can focus on the core problem and skip the other 99%.

NOW do you get it? No?

FYI: not all programs which are written need to be published. I write
a lot of small programs myself which I run a few times and then throw
away. Should I need it again then I can write it again, it's faster
than trying to administrate a lot of small programs, most of whom
will never be used again.

That's fine. You're a hobbyist and a Windows user who is accustomed to
using second-rate, throw-away software. I'm a computer /user/ and I
need programs that perform. I have to sort through about 300
promotional photos that I recently made for a client who renovated her
place of business, and I have to choose the 10 best and prepare them
for publication, and I have to do it soon. Naturally, I'll be using
Aperture and Adobe CS6 Design Premium running on a Mac. Do you think
the client wants to hear "I'm just a hobbyist, so I'll get the product
to you as soon as I can write my own equivalents to the world's best
graphics software?"

First of all, you're a spoiled snob. Your expensive bloatware which you
run on overpriced hardware is utterly unable to produce that table with
altitude + azimuth of stars down to the 4th magnitude. Of course this
doesn't matter to you since nobody would pay you to do it, and you don't
have any need for it yourself since you don't have time for stargazing,
"my time is worth too much" I hear you say.....

Let me repeat, there is nothing wrong with being a hobbyist and playing
at whatever it is, but that won't play if you've got work to do.

And you're a hypocrit as well. From your reactions it is very clear that
you think it's very wrong to quicky write a simple piece of software to
solce a fairly simple problem. Just re-read what you wrote below:

(few
people seem to have the patience to do computations by hand these
days, but that's of course also a possibility).

I have on one of my computers a nine-layer image from a 23 megapixel
professional camera. Add the adjustment layers and it's about a 900 MB
image The lens was a Canon 8-15mm zoom @ 15mm. It covers the full 24 x
36mm frame and it encompasses 180 degrees from corner to corner. So I
can certainly empathize with the above. This image has over 200 million
total pixels and it covers a lot of landscape. I don't have time or the
skill or sufficient paper to do by hand the the trillions of
calculations needed to make minor color and contrast corrections to
this photo before flattening it and handing it to my client. And if I
could do the calculations for each of those 200 million pixels by hand,
how would I translate the resulting numbers to changed pixels? That's
why we have Photoshop.

If you learn some rudimentary programming skills in e.g. Excel,
you'll get a lot of flexibility....

Being a Mac user, I was programming for Excel and writing Word macros
in a windows environment while you were still wondering what to type at
the C: prompt.

Why did you suddenly enter the subject of OS wars? Your post is very
clear evidence that the Mac is not a computer, it's a religion.....

Before the Mac, and the IBM PC and Windows and PC-DOS, even existed, I
was happily typing away, not at the C: prompt but at the A: prompt,
producing astronomical almanac data which directed me, and others, to
interesting things to see in the sky. This I did on Apple hardware. And
almost a decade before that, when it was hard to get any computer access
at all, I computed, by hand (ok, with trig tables) an ephemeris of comet
Halley which woukd return 13 years later. It took some 40 hours, and was
a quite interesting, nowadays probably unique, experience.

In article , says...

Davoud:
Exactly my point. My wife and I have been truck farmers, but we didn't
build our own tractors.

Paul Schlyter
I'm surprised you even drove them -- there are drivers who can drive them
for you...

I can tell that you're a person who wakes up in the morning surprised
by a hell of a lot of things.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you're inconsistent....

On Sun, 16 Sep 2012 22:08:36 -0400, Davoud wrote:
Paul Schlyter:
If you think it's so ridiculous to write a small and simple piece
of
software, then what are you doing on Usenet? It runs on similarly
ridiculous pieces of software.

You aren't very good at analogies, are you? The question is, with
many
quite satisfactory Usenet clients available, some of them free, why
would *I* write my own Usenet client? That I should want to reinvent
wheel is the ridiculous part.

You keep forgetting that I'm a user, not a hobbyist, and I have
already
said that if re-inventing the wheel is your hobby, be my guest.
Bundle
your best-of breed Usenet client with your best-of-breed
planetarium/mount-control/camera-control application and I'll buy
them
both.

So where do you find software which outputs alt+az of all stars down
to mag 4 for a location of your choice? Locating it may take longer
than writing your own code to compute it.


--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost
everything that
you will say in your entire life.


usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

On Sep 17, 2:25*am, Davoud wrote:

That's fine. You're a hobbyist and a Windows user who is accustomed to
using second-rate, throw-away software. I'm a computer /user/ and I
need programs that perform. I have to sort through about 300
promotional photos that I recently made for a client who renovated her
place of business, and I have to choose the 10 best and prepare them
for publication, and I have to do it soon. Naturally, I'll be using
Aperture and Adobe CS6 Design Premium running on a Mac. Do you think
the client wants to hear "I'm just a hobbyist, so I'll get the product
to you as soon as I can write my own equivalents to the world's best
graphics software?"


I like you for your middle class snobbery as I thought a computer was
just a computer apart from being an old one or a new one,when I
started up my old computer it sounded like a tractor compared to the
new one and I remember there was a time when you could go out for a
cup of coffee waiting for a single page to load until one day they
introduced broadband to the Long Island area and the transformation
was startling.Even though my computer is now falling asunder and I
will eventually have to replace it I would be reluctant to do so as
like an old car I am comfortable with the idiosyncrasies.

Now what you are actually drawing attention to is that astronomy
exists today as a magnification exercise with its own pretension and
this is fine if you move in these homocentric circles.An observer
looking at his equatorial mount and using the equatorial coordinate
system will watch the telescope track a star in circumpolar motion -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJP1L_eF9fg

No point in calling you or anyone else silly for attempting to chain
the Earth to the clockwork system of Ra/Dec by believing you are
running daily and orbital motions off a single axis even though it is
utterly unproductive.

I certainly wish somebody could raise themselves to a standard
presently where they can truly enjoy the astronomical event presently
where the polar coordinates turn through the circle of illumination
thereby effectively recognizing another axis of the Earth.The machine
they put on Mars should have had a decent telescope to look out on the
phases of the Earth just as we look out on Venus and see something
which has never been seen before but is easy to predict -

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...precession.svg

The idea of axial precession has to give way to the orbital trait
where the polar coordinates act like a beacon for the orbital behavior
of the Earth and it is not going to be achieved by people who are
taking that late 17th century shortcut using stars in daily
circumpolar motion,snobbery or not snobbery.

On Sep 17, 5:13*am, Paul Schlyter wrote:
In article , says...



Davoud:
Exactly my point. My wife and I have been truck farmers, but we didn't
build our own tractors.

Paul Schlyter
I'm surprised you even drove them -- there are drivers who can drive them
for you...

I can tell that you're a person who wakes up in the morning surprised
by a hell of a lot of things.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you're inconsistent....

Tell me,does it make sense to you that the motion of stars day in and
day out reflect variations in orbital speeds ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJP1L_eF9fg

For an astronomer,stars in stellar circumpolar motion reflect the
useful information of constant axial alignment for an annual orbit but
not rotation as an independent motion,the principles which maintain
rotation as an independent motion to 24 hours are far more intricate
and complicated than lunging at a conclusion using a watch and the
daily return of a distant star.The primary reference for all
timekeeping is the annual return of a specific star which bookends the
number of rotations in an orbital cycle and then the central Sun as
the next reference as it contains the orbital variations in speed by
which rotation as an indepedent and constant motion is extracted as an
assertion,not as a direct observation.

Write all the software you wish,none of it is up to human
interpretation which can combine and separate two different motions
when it is needed and for different purposes.No offence to the guys in
the late 17th century,this is the early 21st century and there is too
much to do to dwell on their errors.

On 17/09/2012 02:25, Davoud wrote:
Paul Schlyter:
Should people refrain from making their own notes too? There are
already so many books out there, so nobody needs to write anything
more .... right?

As usual, you missed it by a mile. Writing an original thought or an
original book is not analogous to writing a piece of software that
scores, if not hundreds, of people have already written, and that some
are even making available for free. A visual comparison of these
programs will reveal that the number of ways in which this data can be
presented is quite limited if it is to be a useful analogue of the
night sky. But you go ahead and write a better one and get it on the
market before the next New Moon, and I'll buy a copy.

FYI: not all programs which are written need to be published. I write
a lot of small programs myself which I run a few times and then throw
away. Should I need it again then I can write it again, it's faster
than trying to administrate a lot of small programs, most of whom
will never be used again.

That's fine. You're a hobbyist and a Windows user who is accustomed to
using second-rate, throw-away software. I'm a computer /user/ and I
need programs that perform. I have to sort through about 300
promotional photos that I recently made for a client who renovated her
place of business, and I have to choose the 10 best and prepare them
for publication, and I have to do it soon. Naturally, I'll be using
Aperture and Adobe CS6 Design Premium running on a Mac. Do you think
the client wants to hear "I'm just a hobbyist, so I'll get the product
to you as soon as I can write my own equivalents to the world's best
graphics software?"

Adobe Photoshop is vastly overrated for what it is. Their main claim to
fame is that it is used by graphic arts professionals and the settings
for eg JPEG saves have been tweaked to mostly save them from themselves.

I was surpised recently how much damage Photoshop's quirky choice of
quantisation tables can do to certain contrasty images with sharp edge
transitions if the user chooses the wrong quality level to save at.

Let me repeat, there is nothing wrong with being a hobbyist and playing
at whatever it is, but that won't play if you've got work to do.

(few
people seem to have the patience to do computations by hand these
days, but that's of course also a possibility).

I have on one of my computers a nine-layer image from a 23 megapixel
professional camera. Add the adjustment layers and it's about a 900 MB
image The lens was a Canon 8-15mm zoom @ 15mm. It covers the full 24 x
36mm frame and it encompasses 180 degrees from corner to corner. So I
can certainly empathize with the above. This image has over 200 million
total pixels and it covers a lot of landscape. I don't have time or the

No it has at most 23 megapixels consisting of RGBalpha and however many
other redundant layers of the same format Adobe has added to it. Some of
them quite likely held in the same grossly oversize format despite the
fact that they consist of a single colour graphic line artwork.

skill or sufficient paper to do by hand the the trillions of
calculations needed to make minor color and contrast corrections to
this photo before flattening it and handing it to my client. And if I
could do the calculations for each of those 200 million pixels by hand,
how would I translate the resulting numbers to changed pixels? That's
why we have Photoshop.

There was a time before Photoshop and indeed before digital imaging when
to do this sort of stuff required rolling your own software. I was
manipulating 4Mpixel monochrome images in the days when VAX11/780s had
something like at most 8MB of main memory and were timesharing. We tried
to stay under 1Mpixel to keep the computational time reasonable.

If you learn some rudimentary programming skills in e.g. Excel,
you'll get a lot of flexibility....

Being a Mac user, I was programming for Excel and writing Word macros
in a windows environment while you were still wondering what to type at
the C: prompt.

However, you seem to be entirely taken in by Adobe's marketing hype.

The learning curve for Photoshop CSn is excessively steep and most
people will not use a fraction of its capabilities even if they boast
about being "Graphics professionals". In fact the more they boast about
it the less they seem to know.

Anyone that doesn't have money to burn and wants to parade the latest
CS6 version in front of their customers should consider Corel's
PaintshopPro (I don't often recommend it as I dislike other features but
it is way more cost effective than the bloated and overpriced PS).

I am with Paul on this one for stars brighter than mag 4 too.

A simple spreadsheet that sorts stars by magnitude and works out their
altitude would not be too hard for someone who was interested in the
answer and would be very educational. Spherical trig is no longer taught
in schools which is a pity it is perhaps more relevant now as an
introduction to non Euclidean geometries than it ever was.

Jean Meuss's book or Duffett-Smiths (or a web search on HA-dec to alt-az
conversions would provide the formulae).

Why does everyone expect to just download an app for everything now?

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

"Davoud" wrote in message ...
Paul Schlyter:
If you think it's so ridiculous to write a small and simple piece of
software, then what are you doing on Usenet? It runs on similarly
ridiculous pieces of software.

You aren't very good at analogies, are you? The question is, with many
quite satisfactory Usenet clients available, some of them free, why
would *I* write my own Usenet client? That I should want to reinvent
wheel is the ridiculous part.

You keep forgetting that I'm a user, not a hobbyist, and I have already
said that if re-inventing the wheel is your hobby, be my guest. Bundle
your best-of breed Usenet client with your best-of-breed
planetarium/mount-control/camera-control application and I'll buy them
both.

==============================================
-
Schlyter can’t eat steak. His teeth are fine but he’d rather go
hungry than buy a new knife.


- This message is brought to you from the keyboard of
Lord Androcles, Zeroth Earl of Medway

Martin Brown
Adobe Photoshop is vastly overrated for what it is. Their main claim to
fame is that it is used by graphic arts professionals and the settings
for eg JPEG saves have been tweaked to mostly save them from themselves.

That's not a bad claim to fame. Photoshop has had competitors. Users
voted and Photoshop won.

I was surpised recently how much damage Photoshop's quirky choice of
quantisation tables can do to certain contrasty images with sharp edge
transitions if the user chooses the wrong quality level to save at.

That's another way of saying that software has to be used correctly to
provide the desired results. I learned that lesson within the first
five minutes the first time I tried to use a computer.

There was a time before Photoshop and indeed before digital imaging when
to do this sort of stuff required rolling your own software

O, jeez, here we go. There was a time before digital imaging when there
was film and there was a time before film when there was only hand-made
art and there was a time when the only graphic art was on cave walls
and so on. I've heard all that. I don't live in the past. I'm going to
work and play with tools of my own choosing.

However, you seem to be entirely taken in by Adobe's marketing hype.

If you have a problem with Adobe, take it up with Adobe. I am not their
advertising rep, their customer-service rep, or their tech-support. If
you don't like Adobe products, don't buy Adobe products. Is there
anything in that that is unclear to you? Is there anything that is
unclear in "I'm going to work and play with tools of my own choosing?"

The learning curve for Photoshop CSn is excessively steep and most
people will not use a fraction of its capabilities....

That's like saying that I shouldn't own a saw because all I need for
the task at hand is a screwdriver. When I install a screw I am using
only a fraction of the tools that I have available to me. I will choose
among the available tools to complete the job at hand.

Anyone that doesn't have money to burn and wants to parade the latest
CS6 version in front of their customers...

You're nuts. My customers have no idea what software I use, but I
imagine they know that "Photoshop" is a synonym for quality digital
photo processing. I'm not even a professional; I fell into computer
graphics for pay by accident when a business owner saw a newsletter I
was producing for a club that we both belonged to and asked if I could
do a catalogue for his company. "Maybe," I said, "but I'll have to
learn how to do it as I go along." And I did it and he saw that it was
good and he took it to a trade show and others saw that it was good and
asked him who did it and that's the way it happened. As a retiree I
don't care to do a lot of paid work, so I don't accept new clients
except in special cases where the work looks really interesting to
me--usually cases like the first one, where I tell the client that I
don't know how to do what s/he wants done, but maybe I can learn. I
limit myself to only about four clients. I don't do this for the money,
though it is obvious that a person who was willing to advertise her/his
services in this geographic area could make a living at what I prefer
to do as a sometimes hobby.

I am with Paul on this one for stars brighter than mag 4 too.

A simple spreadsheet that sorts stars by magnitude and works out their
altitude would not be too hard for someone who was interested in the
answer and would be very educational. Spherical trig is no longer taught
in schools which is a pity it is perhaps more relevant now as an
introduction to non Euclidean geometries than it ever was.

That's not that idiot's contention. He contends that one shouldn't use
an existing spreadsheet. One should write one's own spreadsheet
application. I readily conceded that he should do that if he wants to,
but he wants me to live by his rules and he's quite knotted up because
I'm going to continue live by my own rules. You would save yourself
much anguish by learning that I won't play by your rules, either.

Why does everyone expect to just download an app for everything now?

We've been through this. It's for the same reason that people don't
build their own wris****ches or cars or stoves or refrigerators.
Because it works, it's convenient, it's cheap, it's a proven way of
getting the best products extant, it's fast, and it frees the user to
do what s/he does best while others do what they do best. This is
called "division of labor," part of a rare phenomenon called
"eusociality," and it's the foundation of human civilization.

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

On Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:25:57 -0400, Davoud wrote:
That's not that idiot's contention. He contends that one shouldn't
use
an existing spreadsheet.

Don't lie. I never said one should avoid using an application that's
suitable and available. I merely suggested that writing your own
application is a feasible way too, and it can even be faster than
trying to locate something suitable written by someone else.

And since you're talking about an available spreadsheet suitable for
this particular case: where is it? Or are you just babbling?

One should write one's own spreadsheet application.

I said "could", not "should". It's a non-mandatory option. And I also
said "program", which is a wider category than "spreadsheet
application". You may prefer spreadsheets, but I don't.

I readily conceded that he should do that if he wants to,

No, you requested me to write my own Usenet client, build my own car
from ore I extracted myself from the ground, build a "Rolex" watch,
and other similar nonsense. And you expressed a very strong opinion
about this -- go back and read your own posts!

but he wants me to live by his rules

Look who's talking......

By all means, do live by your own rules! But don't require others to
live by them too...