NightCal Astronomical Calendar Software

Hi Bob and Michael,
I usually use starrynight to see whats going on, but your program is still usefull, it opens quickly and I can see the sun/moon for the entire month at a glance.
Very usefull, I'll be saving this one, would it be ok if we used it in the club monthly meeting??

One thing I'd recommend you might implement is the maximise button, it makes things abit bigger thus easier to see.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for that Bob & Michael.... A practical tool I will certainly use.

Got my exact Lat. & Long. from Google Earth and printed off October.

Probably a silly question, but what do the deg. stand for in top right & top left boxes (e.g. Oct 10th has 8 deg in top left box & 3 deg in top right box)

Keep up the good work. Damon

Hi Bob and Michael,
I usually use starrynight to see whats going on, but your program is still usefull, it opens quickly and I can see the sun/moon for the entire month at a glance.
Very usefull, I'll be saving this one, would it be ok if we used it in the club monthly meeting??

One thing I'd recommend you might implement is the maximise button, it makes things abit bigger thus easier to see.

Keep up the good work.

Feel free to include it in your meetings or website. All we ask is that you acknowledge where the calendar came from. If you are displaying it on a website, we would recommend that you download the file 'key.gif 'from the website to provide people looking at the website with a key to the symbols used. We hope to have the option to automatically produce this key on a later version.

The maximize button has already been mentioned by someone else. The problem is that for technical reasons to do with the way NightCal displays the calendar, this would actually require an almost total rethink of the way NightCal writes the calendar to screen. May be on a much later version.

Thanks for that Bob & Michael.... A practical tool I will certainly use.

Got my exact Lat. & Long. from Google Earth and printed off October.

Probably a silly question, but what do the deg. stand for in top right & top left boxes (e.g. Oct 10th has 8 deg in top left box & 3 deg in top right box)

Keep up the good work. Damon

Thanks for the tip about Google Earth.

The 8 deg is the angle of libration - the amount the face of Moon is tilted towards the Earth at the point of libration (the red arrow).
The 3 degrees is the height of Venus above the horizon in the evening at civil twilight (when the Sun is 5 deg below the horizon).

This is all explained in the file Help.pdf which is included in the download. I'm afraid a traditional help file for NightCal is still a long way off and will probably the last thing to be done before the first full version release (1.0)

If you wish to be kept informed of any proposed or actual changes to NightCal, just drop us an e-mail at nightcal@hotmail.co.uk and we'll add you to our mailing list.

Neither a Linux version nor a Mac version so my only comment is that I cannot use it and that there is no way in hell I am gonna fork out the money for Windows just for this software!

Could I recomend that the developers implement a Java version so that their software can be used by all or perhaps better still a web based version. Either way it is not really on in this day and age to make the assumption that "everyone is a Windows drone", especially when targetting the science comunities which have always provided the bedrock of Unix, Linux and Mac users!

Bart.

I'm sorry you feel this way. This is a program my brother (the programmer) is writing with me (the amateur astronomer). He's helping me out as a favour. I wanted it on Windows, so that's what your getting! We've spent literally hundreds of hours of our spare time developing this program and I have spent about many hours writing the documentation and setting up the website.
This free software is produced by my brother and I simply because we want to; not as a service to the science community. Anyway, it's aimed at the amateur observer, not the science community. If you had read the website carefully, you would have realised this. We just thought it would be a nice idea to let others share our work.

There is no pleasing some people!

OK, you have spent a lot of time and effort developing software in a language that is obviously not portalbe when there are a myriad of alternatives that ARE portable. It is no harder to develop in a language like Java than it is in what ever language you did develop this in but if you had done so your software would be accessible to more people and that can only be a good thing.

By only syupporting windows you are proping up the percieved MicroSoft monopoly and that is a bad thing IMO. This whole notion that "everybody uses windows" is a falacy that MicroSoft just love to push, it is however not true!

By the sounds of it you have a very worthwhile software package here but you are doing yourself and the amateur cominity a disservice by tying it in to windows.

Lastly, you may not consider Amateur astronomers to be a part of the science community but I most certainly do. In fact, Astronomy is the only science left that HAS a thriving amateur community and we shoudl be proud of that and not down-play our selves as 'just amateurs'.

I am an amateur astronomer, I like the idea of your software but I cannot use it because you have decided to tie it in to an opperating system that I cannot afford to use and wouldn't want to anyway because it is rubbish. I am dissapointed by that choice and would ask that in future you target your software creations at everyone and not just "MS Drones" as I'd generally put it.

Bart B.

Anyway, it's aimed at the amateur observer, not the science community. If you had read the website carefully, you would have realised this. We just thought it would be a nice idea to let others share our work.

The users of software are never the people you think!

Not releasing this on other plaforms is understandable, that takes a significant amount of time and effort, therefore would you be interested in releasing the code under some form of open source license to allow others to contribute? I'm not volunteering by the way!

Best Wishes,
~Al