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

Got a barrage of text messages from the students of Computer Science doing their undergraduate thesis in astronomy software.

First of all, they had asked Dayan, the only teacher handling an astronomy subject this term, about getting an evaluation of their thesis in her class during one of its sessions, preferrably during this week. This is because they plan to present their thesis sometime during the first week of April.

No wonder they were asking me if astronomy is offered in the summer. They were planning to have their student evaluation during that time.

Unfortunately Dayan turned them down, saying that all her sessions were booked until the end of the term. They even said "Waaaaah!" in text to emphasize their frustration.

I just told them to give a formal letter to the chairman of the department signed by their thesis coordinator.

I don't know if they've done that, and what the chairman's reaction was.

Second, they said that they had finished the graph for the path of the Moon for one month (March 2004) from the same location, and that they had sent it to my e-mail. Could I please check it, give comments and answer their questions.

Unfortunately it was a few more days afterwards before I could open my school mail. And when I did, there were several posts from them.

The first one just asked questions about what happened when there were less than 14 sets of coordinates for when the Moon is above the horizon.

I could have told them it doesn't matter, because we are only concerned with when the Moon is visible. If it is visible for less than 14 hours at a time, then that's it. We have to accept that and draw our conclusions from that.

Before I could answer that though, they already sent a spreadsheet file with the complete graph for March. There were two more files after that, apparently corrected from the earlier sending.

I didn't look at the earlier ones. I just checked the last one. The accompanying text asked me to see if it was correct. I just said that as far as I could see based on what I believe the path of the Moon looked like it was correct.

This is because I don't know what the path of the Moon looks like, that is why I wanted to see how it appears.

This reminds me again of students who, in the middle of the exam, come up to me asking if what they are doing is correct. Except that with a thesis, there are no wrong results, just wrong analysis or wrong procedure.

Besides, I doubt if their panelists know enough about astronomy to tell them that the graphs they made are wrong.

If they wanted me to give my description of the graph, I couldn't, because I already told them that at the very least I need the months of the equinoxes and the solstices before I can draw a general pattern.

Either they forgot or they didn't understand me the first time. I'll have to wait until they ask for the explanation again, though, before I say anything.