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How to check if skylist file is boogered

I have a skylist file for Larry Mitchell's Advanced Observing Program for the upcoming TSP.

I've emailed the skylist file as an attachment to myself and I can get it loaded into my SkySafari 5 Pro Ver 5.3.1.1 on my iPad Air 2 just fine.

When I open the list, it only shows 9 objects...

If I examine the skylist file with Notepad++ on my PC and count the SkyObject=BeginObject and EndObject=SkyObject pairs, there are 60...

The skylist file does not appear to have any bogus or extraneous characters and of the 9 objects that are listed in SkySafari, they are not the first 9 in the file....

I imagine the response to this will be to contact whoever created the skylist file and I will do that but is there a way to check the file I have for bad syntax / boo boos?

 

TIA

Gordon

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4 comments

  • 0
    Avatar
    Bill Tschumy

    There seems to be something wrong with this list.  I'm looking at it now.  I also get only 9 valid objects although it appears there are 60 in the list.  It is not immediately obvious what is happening. 

  • 0
    Avatar
    Bill Tschumy

    I understand what is happening.  There are many objects in this stylist that are flat out not in the SkySafari database.  Those are automatically excluded when the file is imported.  However, there are other objects that we do recognize by one of the catalog numbers but not enough to confirm it is valid.  For example

    CommonName=Collinder 333
    CatalogNumber=OCL 1017
    EndObject=SkyObject

    We do recognize Collinder 333.  However, we don't have the OCL catalog in our database so we don't recognize the object by the name "OCL 1017".  Our rule is that more than half of the catalog names need to match in order to "validate" the object.  This one doesn't pass and it gets deleted.

    Perhaps we should be more lenient in what we accept as valid.  It is really hard to know.

    When we originally designed the .skylist format, it was mainly for our own internal use.  We really didn't envision other programs generating this lists and throwing in catalogs designations we don't support.

    Perhaps in the future we can handle this better, but for now SkySafari will not handle this "TSP 2017 AOL Open Clusters" list properly.

     

  • 0
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    Gpegue

    Thanks for looking into that Bill.

    I actually wondered if that was what was going on but I discounted the notion since the SS DB's have so _many_ objects.

    So this raises the semi-related question:

    Is there a way to put together a skylist file of objects given RA and DEC with a user specified name that could then be imported?

    Or is a skylist file strictly for objects that are already in the SkySafari object DB? I suspect you'll answer that because of the validation that takes place, custom lists based on RA, Dec and a name won't work...

    Feature Request!!!

    Thanks!

  • 0
    Avatar
    Bill Tschumy

    Observing list (.skylist files) must only contain objects that are recognized in our database.

    We have had a long standing desire to allow user created custom objects.  However this hasn't happened yet.

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