Update to member pages

[Alan Thomas]

Dominic

Keep up the good work. It is appreciated.

Alan

[stan armstrong]

Your work Dominic has transformed my dynamic UGC of First Fireball of 2020 year..I am delighted ..Thank you very much indeed.  PS It is taking some time to change the CONTENT of  ‘Your name’ but hope that will be achieved soon..Meanwhile Regards Stan Armstrong

 

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Sorry to take so long to spot this one but it was prompted by looking at a recent observation by David Strange.

https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20200911_170000_2e604aed4f94042d is the consequence of migrating my https://britastro.org/node/24192

According to the migrated page, the upload occurred a few minutes before the observation was made! The original records the observation time as 11/09/2020 – 18:00 and does not record the upload time.

According to my paper records,the two images in the animated GIF were taken on 2019-08-30 and 2020-08-13.

Not sure what to do here. I can edit the observation time fields but not the upload time. Given that the images were taken in two separate years and only one date-time field can be entered, perhaps that for the last image in the series should be used but advice is welcome.

Regardless of this particular case, perhaps there may be other examples in the database. A simple SQL query should dig out any if they exist.

[Dominic Ford]

The old BAA Member Pages (before December 2020) did allow observation dates to be set in the future. Indeed, that may even have happened rather often: from memory, if people forgot to set the observation date, the default was set to the current time with a granularity of 15 minutes, while the upload time was set precisely. All of that was faithfully migrated across to the new database, even though the user interface no longer allows new observations to be in the future.

For some images, it’s very important to record the observation date – for example, planetary images, variable nebulae, etc. But as you say, there are other types of observation (e.g. blink comparisons) where it’s more complicated. For some deep sky images, where the photons have been collected over many nights, it’s very complicated indeed.

I think it would be reasonable to set the “observation date” to the date of the most recent observation, but there’s no “BAA convention” on this. What’s most important is to provide the details in the explanatory text. I’m sorry that your explanation got missed in the migration – there were a small number of comments that had migration issues, mostly due to character encoding issues.

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Thanks.  Now updated that one using the date of the last image. The time was left at 00:00:00 UTC to indicate that any greater precision is unjustified for an observation which took 349 days to complete.  (Incidentally, should the time of observation field be pre-filled with that value? It seems to make more sense to me than to have it set to the time of uploading.)

Would you consider running the suggested SQL query to see how many other examples exist? If there are only a (relatively) few perhaps a web page could be created with a list of (username, url) pairs. It would then be up to individuals to update their own observations and would require no further action on you part except, perhaps, re-creating the table every few months.

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