Pack: What's the Season?

Description:

This is the Excel spreadsheet for use with the What's the Season? workflow (see list of attributions). It contains the object name, RA, Dec, magnitude, and distance. The spreadsheet was built using the following sources. Dolan (n.d.), Frommert & Kronberg (2007), and Kronberg (1998) were consulted the most, with some RA/Dec values coming from Wikipedia.

Alpha Crucis. (2011, July 28). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved on 26 September 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alpha_Crucis&oldid=441881680

Antares. (2011, October 4). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved on 26 September 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antares&oldid=453979994

Betelgeuse. (2011, September 16). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved on 26 September 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Betelgeuse&oldid=450851312

Dolan, C. (n.d.). Stellar brightness: The brightest stars, as seen from the Earth. Retrieved on 26 September 2011 from http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/brightest.html

Frommert, H., & Kronberg, C. (2007). Messier object data, sorted by apparent visual magnitude. Retrieved on 26 September 2011 from http://messier.seds.org/dataMag.html

Kronberg, C. (1998). The brightest stars. Retrieved on 26 September 2011 from http://maps.seds.org/Stars_en/

Rigel. (2011, August 30). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 0on 26 September 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rigel&oldid=447470897

Description:

When given a list of astronomical object names, this workflow will check them against a simple Excel spreadsheet and return which season the object is best observed in. It will also compare the distances to the objects in a Google Charts bar chart. A later version of this may switch to a scatter plot, depending on whether or not this works with the Google Chart API.

Running this workflow requires Python. Sys and string should be bundled in Python, but the numpy module will need to be downloaded and installed separately if not already on your system.

Description:

This .zip file contains:

pythonicastro-INPUT.xml » The input data used to generate the output.

pythonicastro-distgraph.png » The Google Chart comparing distances. (Unfortunately, this is a bar chart.)

pythonicseasons.xml » The most important output of astronomical objects, RA, Dec, and season that's best for observing.

urlchecker.txt » This output was used for checking the URL to make sure it worked.