When planning out a session, let's say I want to look at galaxies, in the NGC catalog, between 55-70 degrees in altitude, mag 13-14, between 8pm-11:30pm. This is great, but since all of my observations are logged in SkySafari, it would be really great if I could choose a box for Never Observed or something to that effect, essentially hiding anything that SkySafari also has an observation logged for, so I can look only at things I've never seen before. The only way I can think of to accomplish this now is to do that search, create an observing list, then go through the objects one by one to see if they have been observed before looking them up. Far from ideal. Thanks!
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13 comments
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Bill Tschumy Chris,
So you'd like something similar to "Hide Observed" when you highlight an observing list, right? However, this would affect the list of items shown in the observing list? I'll see what I can do.
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Chris Bill-- Yes, that's exactly what I was getting at. Thanks!
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Chris Willis Awesome idea, I would love this feature too!
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Chris Hey Bill-
I noticed that this didn't make it into the last release. Any update on if this is planned? Thanks
Chris -
Bill Tschumy It s still on my list. I did get around 4 user requested features in the release. This timing of this release was such that it has to come out before Starry Night 8 was released. There were some compatibility changes that needed to be made for a smooth interaction.
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Chris Hey Bill, any chance this will make it into the next release?
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Bill Tschumy I doubt it but let's see how the week goes.
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Bill Tschumy OK, I got this into the iOS version. I should be able to get it in Android and Mac before the next release. I made it a bit more general. For a given list, you can choose to display all objects, only observed objects or only unobserved objects. The in-chart highlighting of the objects pays attention to this filter as well. I think this turned out pretty nicely.
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Chris Hey Bill--
This looks cool and should make it much easier to find unobserved objects on a list when trying to finish out the last few of a list. Very helpful. I think my initial thought when I posted this was to have something in the planner, where I could search all galaxies from 10-13 magnitude in the constellation Virgo that I had never logged an observation for, which I still think would be very helpful. I'm constantly wanting to look for 'new objects' that I've never seen before, and I don't currently know of a good way to do that.
Chris -
Bill Tschumy OK, well maybe I misunderstood you. Anyway I think this is a nice addition anyway.
It is significantly harder to have the Planner results show only objects that haven't been observed. I can think about it but not for next week's release.
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Chris Yes, I agree it's a nice addition, and I'm glad we weren't on the same page so now we have it! I can't tell you how many times I've wondered how many objects I have left on a list and have to scroll through several times trying to find them all. This fixes that.
It does seem like it would be harder to show only objects that haven't been observed. I'm guessing that would have to do a normal search, then do a second lookup to the observations database and exclude anything that matched?
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Andrew Read Without diverting the post, please forgive me for suggesting a related idea:
When we bring up the page of observing list there is an icon on the left that looks like a checkbox list with the top icon ticked. Could we have a choice of icons for the different cases as follows
1. Nothing yet observed on this observing list
2. Some objects have been observed but not others
3. All objects observed
It could also be done with the same icon, but with different colours, like traffic lights...
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Bill Tschumy Andrew,
I'm not wild about this idea. There will be performance issues for people that have large numbers to lists or large numbers of objects in the lists. Scanning for observations in not a fast thing to do.
Although not automated, it seems you could do this yourself by prefacing the list with a prefix character indicating if the list is new, partially completed or done.
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