User talk:Yted

Regulus occultation
Hi, Ted. Nice dining with you Saturday evening on 14th Street, and your talk next door really charged up our usually terribly sedate little NYSKIES group. Your cute home-made occulotoscope excited several, and I am thinking of making my upgrade to a bigger GPS camera, eventually needed anyway for some kinds of Earthbound work, sooner rather than later.

I see you have put the coming occultation into both Regulus and 163 Erigone and haven't changed any other articles. Just fine. I might WP:WIKIFY them and trim the star version, on the theory that readers who see it there can click to the rock version. Anyway after the March 20 event I'll trim both and convert to past tense, and watch for results to be posted in the rock article. Thus far there hasn't been any stir in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomical objects. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:07, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Regulus lecture
I sent this by E-mail the other day to the NYSkies mailing list. I'm putting a copy here for good luck.

From: John Pazmino Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 15:05 Subject: [nyskies] News for Fri-Sun Feb 21-23

JP> Mr Ted Blank, IOTA, gives THREE brief-&-prep talks for the Regulus-Erigone occultation of March 20 during this coming weekend. They are spread around the NYSkies region to give most observers a fair chance to learn about the event and how to watch or record it.

Busy fellow, and nice smart guy. John and Daniel and I were pleased to dine with Ted before the meeting.

JP> Altho this is at first a really tough event to appreciate, this particular one is among the very easiest to watch. You do need some optical assistance because it can be dicey to catch the blink-out of Regulus by eye alone with all the other interferences to vision around you or, erm, within the eye itself.

Alpha Leonis is easy to find in the sky, but staring at anything for minutes to catch the moments it winks out and winks back in, that's not so easy. A little easier if you've got an indicator pointing steadily at the target, for example a little mounted telescope or binocular. Many of us have a telescope with equatorial clock drive. That pretty much makes it a snap.

Timing is also a a difficulty. Cellphones, as Ted explained, get their time from the cellphone company, whose clocks are very accurate but not accurately aligned with GMT or anything. Few of us carry a wristwatch anymore, and fewer ever carried one that was kept set to a fraction of a minute, much less a second. However, Ted told us of smartphone apps that align themselves with USNO or other precise sources, calculating the milliseconds of Internet lag between the clock's location and yours. The app then gives one or another kind of display, for example big numerals changing a hundred times a second, a sweep hand going around once a second passing a hundred tick marks, sounding audible beeps or ticks, etc. Apps include stopwatch features that let you click the beginning and end of an event.

One problem is, the ones he mentioned are all iPhone apps, but the majority of smartphones today are Android like mine. I don't know whether any Android apps exist.

Another problem is, precision of using a stopwatch or a ticking clock to time a visual event depends on eye hand coordination. That's when another aspect of modern electronics comes in: Video. A moderately big consumer camera such as a low end DSLR with manual controls makes it easy to take a movie of the whole event. It naturally makes for great precision of the duration of an occultation, and if the sound track records clock-ticks or time-beeps from the phone app, you also get precise absolute times. Well, not you or me, because we don't understand how to extract the information quickly and precisely, but we just have to upload the video to the page that IOTA has for that purpose.

My little Nikon P-330, if powered by an experienced astrophotographical mind, could probably do the job. Unfortunately, the mind that powers it is my own. The controls for ISO and manual focus for still photography are clumsy, and I don't even see how to adjust them for motion pix. My ordinary urban photography also sometimes exceeds its powers, so I've been thinking of getting a bigger camera with GPS and more dials and rings, such as the Nikon P520. Not a DSLR; they're all too big for easy operation with one hand still guiding the bicycle, which is a more common mode for me than astrowork is.

Camera phones have potential, since they can run apps instead of making us connect and coordinate different neat little boxes of electronics. However, their tiny cameras are barely adequate for snapping a spouse standing in bright sunlight in front of a tourist attraction. What would be really nice would be a phone camera, that is instead of a smartphone with a poor little camera on the back, it would be a moderately powerful camera with a little smartphone on the back, fully integrated of course so it can see, time and report the event. Alas, current examples seem inadequate to my wishes.

Ted showed us his little home-made occulta-scope, a cheap 35mm monocular with screw for camera tripod, and adapter to the kind of camera that allows changing lenses. Usually that's a DSLR but cheaper, smaller interchangeable lens cameras are also made. A proper telephoto lens would do the job, but one providing a similar focal length and aperture would be an expensive, high-precision piece of optics.

Before starting on his promotional junket around astronomy clubs in the occultation path, Ted added a notice of this astronomical event into163_Erigone and the Regulus article. As an experienced Wikipedia editor I added a trimmed version to the Occultation article also. Probably I'll trim the Regulus mention as well. Readers who want the details can click to the asteroid's article, since this Main Belt asteroid is otherwise a bore. I notice IOTA has no article in Wikipedia. That's proper for a pretty small org, but I think I'll add a sentence about it, maybe even a paragraph, in the Occultation article.

I noticed Facebook has a little-used page about the occultation, but not about the Association. I don't intend to add one; perhaps someone at IOTA should. Google Plus has no mention that I can find; no problem as despite being a more "serious" competitor against FB it's a lot smaller and less important. Jim.henderson (talk) 03:07, 26 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Note from Ted Blank: Yes, the Android app called "TimeTheSat" is functionally equivalent to the iPhone apps I mentioned last weekend, syncs its time via communication with USNO timeservers, and has buttons for you to click to start and stop a timed interval.
 * I will add it to the presentation.

I have moved your reply, Ted, and reformatted the Wiki way even though that removes it from the particular point you were replying to. Jim.henderson (talk) 16:53, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Map removed
Like some other nice, smart but non-Wikipedia people I know, you're what we insiders call, sometimes with a sneer, WP:SPA. Not a big problem as it mainly means you're not familiar with the tricks of our corporate culture. Friendly insiders (there's plenty of us) can help find the opportunities you don't know about. We can't much protect against our usually arcane and sometimes overly strict rules. What, rules? But, anyone can write anything, right? No, not really, but instead of rules we call most of them them standards, guidelines, even suggestions. One strict rule is, no unauthorized copying of someone else's work. Naturally there's room for interpretation, but I'm afraid a copy of a Google map with some lines added doesn't have much room. I hope someone can use a free license base map to make an occultation path map; I don't do that kind of graphics work. Jim.henderson (talk) 16:54, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi Jim, thanks for the feedback. I understand a bit more now, and I've replaced it with an outline map that we generate within IOTA. I've asked Steve Preston who in fact generates the maps to put a notice of public domain (or whatever is appropriate - maybe you can help with the wording?) on his site where he publishes the predictions and maps.


 * Must sign at the end of your words with four tildes ( ~ ) so eavesdroppers understand who wrote what. Wikipidia talk pages are not about privacy; they are about opening up everything to more people than could possibly want to know. So, I put the picture into the asteroid article without waiting for the OTRS clearance. We have an awful lot of rigmarole like this, partly because thoughtless people keep putting pirated pictures into Wikipedia, but mainly because we put an awful lot of rigmarole into everything. The author of the picture (yeah, in copyright parlance it's "author") should say in the picture's caption on his Website that it's under Creative Commons license CC0. There are plenty of other options. For example "Contrinuted by author [name of author] to Public Domain" will do, but I always use CC0 for my thousands of pictures because for some reason it makes our Wikicopyright Police feel good. You should also put in the "License" section of Commons:File:Outline_map_of_the_path_of_the_shadow_of_asteroid_(163)_Erigone_as_it_occults_Regulus_on_March_20,_2014.jpg. All license questions, incidentally become much easier if the author is the one doing the upload. Jim.henderson (talk) 22:32, 26 February 2014 (UTC)