Presently the Sky Quality Mpsa slider has a minimum value of 17.0. You must all live under beautifully dark skies on a planet where there is no moon! Would it be possible to change the minimum value of the slider to 16.0 for the rest of us poor Earthlings?
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Votes
10 comments
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Bill Tschumy Andrew,
Wow, your skies must be pretty bad. A Mpsa of 17 corresponds to a limiting magnitude of 3.1. Are you actually making observation is skies worse that that?
Yeah, we can probably change this.
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Andrew Read Hi Bill, yes my range is from 18.5 at best down to not much more than 16.0. The latter end of the range tends to be moonlight nights with very still and humid air that diffuses the moonlight throughout the sky. These nights can be surprisingly good seeing and among the best for double stars and planets. Otherwise I’m observing star clusters and asterisms.
Much appreciated if the change is possible.
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Andrew Read Looking forward to this one as my skies get hazier with the spring warmth :-)
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Chris If we extend the range on this, it might become difficult to land the slider on the correct two decimal mpsa. It's actually pretty difficult already, even on my tablet. Rather than go back to single decimal, could we have the option to enter it manually, similar to how you can enter times and dates manually on an observation? Keeping two decimal places is key.
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Andrew Read Fair point. Two sliders side by side, a short one for the integer part (16 - 23?), and a longer one for the decimal part (.00 - .99)?
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Bill Tschumy Chris,
Right now is seems only the Android version allows you to specify the mpsa to 2 decimal places. The iOS only allows 1. I still don't understand why 2 decimal places is critical. My SQM always has some variability in readings. I *never* get two successive readings that are consistent in the second decimal place.
I could just change the UI so the limiting magnitude and sky quality are type in fields rather than sliders. How would people feel about that?
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Chris I don't think it's about getting the same exact reading two times in a row; rather, taking three in the same area and using an average. I get numbers almost identical with three readings. There's a huge difference at a given site between 21.25 and 21.34, but those both round to 21.3 with one decimal point. 21. 25 would be approaching a not very good night at my site, where a 21.34 would be average, and 21.44 would be good, but there'd be almost no way to assess these if everything was either 21.3 or 21.4. I've never seen an observer documenting observations with an SQM to a single decimal point. A typed in field would be fine for me, the slider is difficult to make work for such a large range.
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Bill Tschumy Yeah, a slider really doesn't work well with that kind of granularity, I may try the type in field.
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Chris I've always thick l thought it would be cool too if, when one enters the sqm reading, the limiting magnitude field auto-calculated based on the formula that converts MPSAS to NELM.
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Andrew Read I noticed this is now included - thank you, and I hope others are finding the feature useful
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