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What Time And Date Format Does SkySafari 5 Pro Use? (Answer: All Times & Dates Are Stored As A Julian Date - Which Is Independent Of Time Zones, Daylight Savings, And Various Calendar Quirks)

I had problems with all the observations and sessions saved and synchronized in LiveSky (created with SkySafari Pro 6) when running StarryNight 8 Pro.

I have the files of my observations with SkySafari Pro 5 (which I saved in GDrive).
I would like to retrieve those observations without migrating all the data.


I want to manually edit the sessions and observations.
I have several .skyset, .txt and .skylist files. In the file "My Favorites.skylist I can see (with WordPad or notepad) the annotations of the observations as in this example:

SkyObject=BeginObject
ObjectID=1,0,5
CommonName=Jupiter
CatalogNumber=5
DateObserved=2.458280413194444e+06
Comment=Júpiter con tres bandas visibles.\n
Location=Valencia
Equipment=ORION Starblast 4,5" Astro - Newton, Orion Sirius (Plossl) 7,5 mm.
Seeing=2
DefaultIndex=4
EndObject=SkyObject

How should I interpret the "DateObserved" value?
Is it possible to convert it into a date and time of observation so that I can manually create that observation?

Note: I do not want to import all data from SkySafari 5 to SkySafari 6 to avoid duplicates and erroneous data.

Thanks for the help.

 

Date Votes

4 comments

  • 1
    Avatar
    Chris

    Hey Esteban--

    Try moving your decimal over 6 spots to the right, which I'm guessing is what the e+06 references, removing the e+06, and then converting from that Julian date to your local time and date in your preferred format.  In excel, I use this formula to convert my Julian dates to CST:

    =(A2-2415018.5)-6/24

    where A2 is the cell with the Julian date in it.  If you wanted to convert all of the dates in all of your files, it could be done using Excel and macros, but would certainly be some work.  I believe the new exports from LiveSky, and I'm assuming StarryNight, use just straight Julian dates.

    Hope this helps!
    Chris
  • 0
    Avatar
    Esteban Javier Millan Rivas

    Thank you Chris.
    I will try this.
    If it works it will be very useful for me.

  • 0
    Avatar
    Bill Tschumy

    As Chris has said, all times & dates are stores as a Julian Date.  This kind of date is independent of time zones, daylight savings time and various calendar quirks.  There are web sites that have utilities for converting between Julian Dates and regular dates.  E.g. https://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.php

     

  • 0
    Avatar
    Esteban Javier Millan Rivas

    Yes, thank you very much.

    I forgot to comment here that I had already managed to convert that data (I used a utility from a website).

    What I did not do yet was create the sessions and observations manually using this data.

    I hope to do this later (when SN-LiveSky-SS synchronization is more mature)

    Thank you very much again.

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