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

Finally, I have room to talk about the College of Computer Science students doing their undergraduate thesis on astronomy software.

They finally defended, a month before the end of the term, and the panelists’ verdict was a re-defense.

According to the e-mail they sent me the Computer Science teachers had a lot of demands, but they only gave me one they wanted to deal with right away (I wonder if that means they will be giving me the problems piece-meal). This had to do with the “actual stargazing”, although it wasn’t that the teachers wanted to go or wanted them to be part of an observational session.

The star maps I had given them and that I told them to reproduce in their software was adjustable every hour. This, I felt was sufficient for an amateur astronomer to appreciate when a constellation is visible or not.

According to the panelists, it isn’t enough. They want the students to have star maps that are accurate to every ten minutes instead of every sixty minutes. It probably has to do with feeling that the students did not do enough difficult work to merit as a satisfactorily “world-class” product in their eyes, because I can’t believe these keyboard pushers would deign to know more about their charges’ client’s demands that the client himself, who in this case, is me.

I don’t find it difficult to imagine though, that if the students were making a program that would be used in a business company, that the teachers, citing years of knowing the needs of the industry, would change some of the end users’ requests without consultation. After all, the final recipients can’t complain; they are getting usable software for free.

Personally though, the change in the sky every ten minutes (stars rising in the east and setting in the west) is not enough to print out half a dozen maps for a two-hour session, or several dozen for an overnight session. On the other hand, I do not believe anyone would go stargazing for less than twenty minutes, which would necessitate the users to print only one map. From my at least ten years of experience with first time sky-watchers, one map an hour is enough, sometimes even excessive.

It’s just plain useless, what they’re requesting, even from the standpoint of someone who wants the software to have a sped-up animation of the “sky” moving, every ten minutes is not enough. So that cannot be their objective.

What’s even worse is that it seems the students have been duly intimidated by their evaluators’ vast knowledge of All Things. In their e-mail, they asked me how many additional maps they would have to plot to concur with the Computer Science teachers’ request. The students seem to have forgotten that since their time gap was divided by one sixth that would mean they would need five times more maps than they currently have. Or maybe they knew, but were afraid to admit it to themselves, and were hoping I would tell them they did not have to work much more than they already have. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell them that. And I’m not the one giving them a grade either. They will just have to tough it out, and I’ll help them however I can from this angle.

There’s the bell. New topics tomorrow, for now: class dismissed.