What are the parameters for What’s in the Sky Tonight ?
Maybe I’m missing something, but some of the targets suggested are not ideal for that particular night. Maybe at a different time of the year, but not on that particular night.
Please bring me up to speed for I have not found any advantage of using that feature on the website.
For instance, Pleiades doesn’t appear over my preset 30 degrees until 2:44am and the Zenith doesn’t occur until 7:15am in the morning. That particular target shouldn’t even appear in the list ?
Since it’s impossible to predict what kind of targets each user will prefer (visual vs. astrophotography; early vs. late session, etc.), the homepage suggestions are a random selection considering some of these things:
Objects must reach an altitude of at least 30 degrees for one hour during the astronomical night - that’s why you see objects staying above 30 degrees for one hour right before the sunrise.
Objects are filtered by size depending on their types (e.g. galaxies have a minimum size requirement of 5 arcmin, while galaxy clusters have a maximum size of 5 degrees)
Depending on the current date, a minimum distance to the moon is required too, using the Moon-Avoidance Lorentzian
In the near future I’ll be refactoring this section when I release the upgraded DSO database so I might tweak these parameters a bit.
