Book Project: Discovering Asteroids

[Ags]

Thanks for the offer, I will think about it, maybe there are parts I can open up. By the way, most of the code is in Java, although I use Python to get data dumps from NASA Horizons.

The books are rendered with Apache FOP, a bit of a dinosaur, but it works!

[Ags]

I made a few more improvements to the speed and got it 10x faster again. Still too slow to run the process every time the book builds so it will be done as a separate process - one more thing to remember when I come back to the book next year. I added some filters: lunar conjunctions are no longer covered due to parallax issues, and I have chosen to only show events with an elongation of at least 70 degrees (which of course also excludes Venus and Mercury events from the results). Here are the updated events for the remainder of this month, including the interesting conjunction of Pallas and T CrB:

Edited Thursday at 06:04 by Ags

[Ags]

I got the new print proof in the mail this weekend. Pretty pleased with the look of the book, although we are still making many changes based on forum feedback and online editing.

The "the"in the title is typo, it won't be in the final book:

The overview charts and milky way traces look fine to me:

 

[Ags]

I recently changed to working 4-day weeks (is that semi-retirement?), so I now have Friday mornings free to work on my book projects. I am finding this a great improvement over my previous modus operandi which involved burning the midnight oil after a long day of other intensive computer work. I'm really enjoying the project now and it is good to see tangible progress each week.

I have finished the Annual Highlights section, unless further bloopers are found! I added in close approaches to Earth as another form of highlight (just realized I need to sort highlights in each day by time...):

I also increased the number of rows in the "Brightest Asteroids" table from 40 to 50 and made the table row height more regular. And I added in some color coding.

We're working on the index now. The book's textual content is stored in text files, and I added a markup system today to index any text inside square brackets. The brackets of course don't appear in the actual book.

 

 

Edited 13 hours ago by Ags