Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

The past few days the students of Computer Science making their thesis on astronomy software texted me twice about checking my e-mail for some of the questions that they sent. Then when I didn't reply soon enough for their purpose, they made my phone ring once, on several occasions (if that makes sense).

I'm just a little thankful that they don't go to see me (or ask for a meeting) for every little thing that they need to clarify or confirm.

When I finally did open my e-mail, the first two (or is that the lastest two?) questions were about things seemingly geared towards making their work a little easier, at the expense of the intention of their software.

This is just like what they asked last week about not including the star cluster Pleiades in their software, because deep sky objects are not supposed to be included in their package.

I told them that Pleiades should be mentioned (even if other deep space objects are not) because it is easily visible, and it would be a point against the usefulness of their software if amateur astronomers could see the star cluster in the sky, and turn to their software only to find out that it does not help them in identifying the configuration.

This time, since we has somehow agreed to limit their identification to the 54 brightest stars, that they of course do not want to include constellations that do not have any stars in that list.

In particular, they asked about Aquarius. I told them that Aquarius is a zodiac constellation and should be included because of the average person being familiar with it through astrology. And one of the most common misconceptions they should clear is the difference between astrology and astronomy. The same is true with the constellation of Cancer.

The second e-mail after that was a list of the 54 brightest stars and the constellations they belonged to. They were asking if it was okay. Not that I could refute that. Yes, those are the 54 brightest stars and those are the constellations they are part of. So as not to limit my reply to that e-mail to just one word, I also reminded them about including the zodiac constellations and Pleiades.

The third e-mail was about the path of the Moon. This is one feature that I have not seen done on any commercial astronomy software, and wasn't even done properly by the thesis student last year.

This is how the path of the Moon looks like from one location for the entirety of one month, every hour from moonrise to moonset.

What sparked this curiosity is the fact that there are times when the Moon is visible from my window, and there are times when it is not. As far as I can tell, this appearance is not based on any easily determined cycle of the phases or the time of year (just like with the Sun moving Northward or Southward in its rising and setting location throughout the year).

It's something I have yet to do manually, so I told the students that if they can't extract it from the source code of my other student's thesis program that I gave them, they will have to wait until I have the free time to list down the relative celestial coordinates of the moon for the period of one month, then plot it using polar coordinates.

Those are their questions for this week. I don't think these are the last either.