[Aavso-photometry] Airmass calculation

[Michael Newberry]

Hi everyone,

I've been away for a few days and just caught this thread. By shear 
coincidence at the request of a number of users, last week we had added an 
airmass calculator to appear in the upcoming minor release of Mira Pro. The 
last few days, we've been testing it and everything looks good, including 
the sidereal time which appears accurate to better than 0.1 second at 
current epoch. Airmass is accurate down to a value of around 40 at the 
horizon. The Airmass calculation is output in the photometry results table 
and is also available independent of photometry using its own dialog. The 
Mira update, version 7.71, should be available tomorrow afternoon unless 
there's some unforseen snag. And incidentally, as per other requests 
mentioned in this thread, Mira has always tabulated a SNR value and two 
separate estimates of the magnitude error for each star.

On a side note, I went to compare the Mira airmass against the AAVSO airmass 
calculator and noticed that the AAVSO calculator uses a positive value for 
longitude west of Greenwich. The convention we used in Mira is for negative 
longitude west of Greenwich, which is the IAU standard based on the 
definition of planetocentric coordinates. I already sent a note to Aaron 
Price about it.

Michael Newberry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Goff" <b-goff at sbcglobal.net>
To: "Jim Jones" <nt7t at comcast.net>
Cc: <aavso-photometry at aavso.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 9:27 AM
Subject: Re: [Aavso-photometry] MaxIm Version 5


> Jim,
> I remember from a few months ago there was discussion about AAVSO
> developing a standardized output format for software developers, but
> I've not seen any sort of update on it.  Otherwise, I agree that the
> RA/Dec tracking would be a great enhancement.
>
> Bill
>
>
> On Apr 17, 2007, at 7:05 PM, Jim Jones wrote:
>
>> I notice that Doug George is starting to talk about MaxIm Version 5.
>> This might be a good time for the photometry community to get their
>> licks in for improvements.
>>
>> I for one would like to see  more detailed photometry reports (giving
>> the ADU numbers behind the mags) or at maybe a secondary report giving
>> the details.  Maybe the way Astrometrica uses it's Report File and
>> Log File.
>>
>> Kind of a bigger item, but I would also like to see more of the
>> photometric functions exposed so they could be reached by scripts.
>>
>> As long as I'm dreaming how about an option to follow the stars
>> based on
>> RA and Dec rather than x and y coordinates when doing a TS?
>>
>> Anyway if we could get our act together and make a concerted effort,
>> maybe we could get some improvements.
>>
>> Jim Jones, JJI
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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