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

At the end of last week I told the students that I was free to see them for an hour later in the day. They replied telling me to go to their computer lab where they were programming their thesis.

They showed me two of the constellations they were going to plot, based on the 70 brightest stars they will identify in their software.

They were Leo and Gemini, the former of which looked twice as large as the latter. I told them that according to ancient Greek illustrations, those two constellations were more or less the same size as in reality.

They also showed me the map with the brightest stars that the users of their software are supposed to print out. It only had large dots, medium size dots and small points, along with the compass directions.

Compared to the commercial software which is our primary reference, there were no constellation lines, there were no star or constellation labels, and there was no ecliptic. No wonder one of their panelists said it didn't look very helpful for the amateur astronomer going stargazing.

I told them that at the minimum, they should have maybe the star labels and the inclusive constellation, possibly in different fonts. They should also have a reference (starting) point - or in the case of the ecliptic - line.

I suggested using the Milky Way, but, unlike the path of the Sun in the sky in the course of one year, the Milky Way sometimes is close to parallel to the horizon and therefore not visible. The ecliptic, at least from Manila, is always a line that is visible in the starmap, if not in the actual sky.

The third suggestion I gave them was to use the Summer and Winter Triangle, and use the closest recognizable constellation. For the former, it is Cygnus, which includes the Northern Cross, and for the latter, it is Orion. Most of the time one of these configurations is visible in the sky, and for the rare times that they are both close to the horizon and difficult to spot, they could also use Scorpius and the Teapot asterism in Sagittarius.

They are going for the last one to put in their starmap.

I also had to clarify for them about plotting the path of the Moon. Despite the very detailed texts that I sent them, they still tried to plot the path of the Moon only for between sunset and sunrise, even though half of the time, the Moon is visible the same time as the Sun.

They were also able to determine that the path of the Moon is different in March of this year and March of last year. But I told them that it was not necessary for their thesis to show the path of the Moon for every specific month and year, like the star map.

I told them that this was just one aspect of celestial motion not shown by our primary commercial software reference, or by the software made by my former thesis advisee.

These students, by the way, only had in their computer one of the earlier drafts of the graduated student's thesis. The latest one would have been a better reference for them because it also included the zodiac constellations in a belt around the celestial sphere.

I had to give them a review on polar coordinates, which is similar but not exactly the same as the altitude and azimuth coordinates of the two-dimensional representation of the visible bodies. I also had to explain to them how to convert it to cartesian coordinates because the spreadsheet software that we use does not have a polar graph.

I had to explain to them why only the path of the Moon for March, June, September and December are important. I had to tell them about equinoxes and solstices, particularly the Vernal Equinox, which was just yesterday.

When they have given a good representation of those charts, then we could start with the analysis that will be included with their software.

I would be satisfied with that, but the question is, would their panel be, and could they fail the students even if the end user is contented with their work?