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I commented on that same image by Martina and liked it too but that info has gone too. As Paul says might be indicative of other missing info. Great job otherwise Dominic.
But will animated Giffs work now??
Martin
I commented on that same image by Martina and liked it too but that info has gone too. As Paul says might be indicative of other missing info. Great job otherwise Dominic.
But will animated Giffs work now??
Martin
Thanks for pointing this out, Mike. I had unintentionally removed the ability to add links to the descriptions of images (and comments too). The “link” button should now have reappeared.
Thanks for pointing these issues out, Paul.
* The issue with the page <https://britastro.org/observations/user.php> should now be fixed.
* Animated GIFs should work fine, though there is sometimes a lengthy processing time after you upload them. This sometimes means they may not appear straight away. Normally this is a few seconds, but in one extreme case (with many frames) I’ve seen a processing time of two minutes.
* I received an error report from the issue you had with the comment editor, and I think this should now be resolved. The problem was caused by your comment being over 256 characters, which should have been fine, but my code couldn’t handle it… 🙂
* There is indeed an issue with some images being erroneously tagged with the wrong objects. This is a feature of the migration process of images from the old system to the new, and should not affect new uploads. Basically, the old system did not tag which objects were in which images, and so I had to populate this information by searching through the metadata associated with images for the names of objects. In most cases this worked very well, but unfortunately “Copernicus” is both the name of a Moon crater and also the star 55-Cancri. Also, images of comet M3 (Atlas) are unfortunately also tagged with Messier 3. At some point, perhaps we’ll find a volunteer who wants to go through and manually correct some of these mis-tagged images…
Sorry about this.
We did test that comments were migrating properly, but it seems some may have slipped through the net.
Unless we discover that this is a really widespread problem, it’s probably going to be quite hard to fix retrospectively now, as we’d have to merge the old and new comments.
It was noticeable that in the previous system relatively few images attracted comments, and our hope is that by making comments more prominent in the new system, images will start attracting a bit more discussion.
At least one animated GIF works.
https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20200911_170000_2e604aed4f94042d
Works for me, anyway.
Hi Dominic,
I’ve just added a couple of images taken in September. I always enter my times as UTC, e.g. 2020 Sep 13 23:13:22 but it is listed as Observed 2020 Sep 14 00:13 UTC. That pesky BST !
The ‘Technical details and background story’ window doesn’t have a spell checker. Could this be enabled?
Thanks,
Alex.
Seconded.
I hadn’t noticed this effect, so have little idea whether it affects any of my uploads.
Can it be made explicit that times should always be entered in UTC, please, regardless of local time zone, daylight saving, etc, and the web site software never changes what is entered regardless what time it might be for itself? The old “you asked for it, you got it” approach.
The sky map feature is really nice!
But (you knew there would be a but, didn’t you) it doesn’t work as I expected. In particular, there is only one image noted as being in Sculptor, and that is not mine of the globular NGC288.
Fair enough, the plate solve didn’t work well enough.
However, discovering that Jupiter was to be found on the Pavo-Indus border came as quite a shock!
I took an image on the Tel-Ind border a while ago, but that is not the one indicated on the map. Indeed, it is not indicated at all.
I suspect that some hand annotation might be required. I will offer my services if desired.
Far too early to spend time on this now, but would it be possible to add a zoom in/out button to the sky maps, ala google maps?
Dear Alex,
Thanks for this useful bug report.
* I’ve fixed the lack of spell checker. I hadn’t realised there was a switch I needed to set to enable it.
* It was always our intention that all times should be entered, recorded and displayed in UTC. A mistake on my part meant an erroneous timezone conversion was happening in the display code. So, the observation you added earlier today was recorded correctly, but was being displayed incorrectly. This is now fixed.
* Unfortunately, this has opened a whole new can of worms. If you look back to observations you uploaded over the summer. They are now showing incorrect times. Upon further inspection, these times have been faithfully migrated from the old Drupal system. But the previous f***ing content management system was doing everything in local time, not UTC. Hence the timestamps from all our old data are wrong. Theoretically this could be fixed, but it would be a heck of a lot of work…
Best wishes,
Dominic
Hi Dominic,
Many thanks for your work on this significant project and for looking at all the issues raised.
I’m happy to just move forward with new Album entries having correct timestamps and not worry about past entries. They’re for presentation purposes only and the work submitted to Sections will be logged with the correct dates and times.
Cheers,
Alex.
1) Problems with the plate solver
We’re aware that the plate-solving software is producing a high rate of false matches currently.
I’m surprised by this, as we’re using <astrometry.net> with mostly default settings, and it is supposed to be quite robust against finding spurious matches. However, I’ve told it that we have no prior information about the field-of-view of each image, so it’s searching for matching star patterns from a full range of length scales, from 30 degrees right down to 2 arcminutes. Consequently, the database of star patterns it’s using is extremely large: about 30 GB of data.
My guess is that we’re getting spurious matches because there are an awful lot of possible star patterns that an image can spuriously match when we’re checking it against so many possibilities. The sky is quite large when you look at it with a 2 arcmin field-of-view.
As for finding Jupiter in Pavo – well, astrometry.net looks only at stars, and knows nothing about planets. This is no more surprising than some of the meteor spectra which are also getting erroneous fits. In general, I would not expect planetary images to get successfully plate-solved as they wouldn’t contain enough stars.
At some point, it would be nice to improve this, and once we do so, it should be possible to retrospectively update the plate solutions of old images (at the cost of a few thousand hours of computation time). However, fiddling with this is likely to be a large project, and I’m not volunteering to do it imminently.
2) The sky map
Note that the sky map only shows 400 images at a time. You should see a message at the top along the lines of: “Showing latest 400 of 2568 observations. Older observations have been omitted to avoid excessive processing time.” Note that it also cannot show images which haven’t been plate solved, for obvious reasons.
You really don’t want it to try to display thousands of images at the same time.
If your image isn’t showing up, you probably need to make your search criteria more specific.
I like the new facilities very much, but has the zoom in (enlarge) link been removed ? (Sorry if this have already been discussed)
Tim,
I’m guessing you’re referring to the image-download button, which used to open / download the original full-resolution image file. You can still do this.
If you right-click the image and select “Open image” (the exact wording will vary between browsers), your browser will open the full-resolution image.
Alternatively, underneath the image, in the section “Files associated with this observation”, you can download the original image file onto your computer for viewing in your favourite graphics package.
Best wishes,
Dominic
Could a short term solution be for the submitter to have the option to disable plate solving where it is obviously incorrect or otherwise inappropriate
Cheers
Robin
Wanted to add a comment to POTW but after pressing submit. It said ‘blank comment ignored’ and nothing is showing.
Martin
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