Starship Asterisk*

I was trying to download the movie files for January,2004 to start rating them, but i found that only the movie files from January,2004 from South Africa and Austrila can be found. All the other CONCAMS that where operational do not have the movie files. This might mean that we will have to do a picture by picture rating, even though this will take more time. I will look into whether later months have the movie files and report back. If anyone knows where the missing files are, please tell me. Thanks

Matt Merlo

Matt,
Movie files are available for all CONCAMS starting April 15th. Maybe the older movie files have been burned to DVD along with the FITS images? If they are on DVD, perhaps we can still use them. Looking at 4 months of images for all of the CONCAMS (except SA and SD) could be a big job.

These are notes from the Thursday NSL lunch that are relavent to this project. First, it was estimated that the maximum time it should take to examine one month's worth of images from one NSL observing site is about 30 minutes. Therefore the time commitment needed per person on this project is

time ~ (0.5 hours/month/site) x (12 months) x (8 sites) ~ 48 hours

Since experienced NSL watchers can do a month faster than 0.5 hours, several observatories have archived fewer than 12 months, and not everyone will be doing all 8 sites, this time is closer to a theoretical maximum.

The priority for observatories wrt this project was deemed to be, from highest priority to lowest: MK, HL, KP, CI, SA, CP, WO, and SS. MW and RH will not be done this round. Project participants should work on assessing star visibilty fraction on these observatories from highest priorty to lowest.

Three people downloaded all January 2004 images from CI: Wellesley, Matt, and Lior. If I recall correctly, their respective estimates of clear sky fraction were 60, 70, and 50 percent. This indicates that CI had a clear sky fraction of 60 percent in January 2004 to an accuracy of about 10 percent.

Wellesley is first author on the January 2005 paper at the San Diego meeting of the American Astronomical Society and will lead this effort. So please post relavent information about this project here, and contact Wellesley (wpereira at mtu.edu) for specific information. Wellesley will have the abilty to create MPG movie files from existing JPG images in the archive.

If there are any lurkers out there who want to help out, please reply to this post and we will try to fit you in.

- RJN

The easiest way to do that (to my opinion) is to use web snake (http://www.websnake.com/) to download all the pictures to a single directory and then to use ifranviewer(http://www.soft32.com/download_347.html) to see the pictures one by one.

I just downloaded websnake and irfanview. I think it would be good to also know the unix command to convert nightly files into movies on the concam server and later compare which one's more efficient.

Once I get the movie creation figured out, my personal plan of action would be to continue analyzing the skies over CI for the remaining 11 (10 so far) months, and then pursue each of the other observatories in the order RJN mentioned.

Just a note: creating movie files on the concam server 'for the nights that do not have them saved', would probably cost a lot of space on the server. So I would want to delete the movie files that I create after their use to me. Perhaps we can coordinate how best to do this, if we go the unix route, that is, as opposed to the web snake route, so that the movies created may be useful to more than one of us.

The best and fastest alternative, in my opinion, would be to find the DVDs with January through May (or later) data for each night that doesn't have a movie online, and use the movie files directly from these. This would save us all a lot of time. An idea that comes to mind is to categorize all the old DVDs and then use Lior's lab as the DVD library, signing out one or several DVDs at a time as we need them and logging our sign-outs.

-Wellesley.

Matt and I have recreated the movie files for january, they are now available online. Once everyone has used these files we will delete them and create the movies for Feb.

Vic Muzzin wrote:Matt and I have recreated the movie files for january, they are now available online. Once everyone has used these files we will delete them and create the movies for Feb.

Hey Vic,
where these movie files are located?

They are at the original links for the movie files.