(1) All the data reading zones (grids, memos, etc.) have been unified with a color schema Silver/Black (background/text). Writable grids are White/Black colored.
(2) System combo-boxes have been replaced with a nicer grayish control, more suitable with the general look of the Application. I should do something like this with the horrible Radio Buttons shown in Windows.
(3) Some data grids were not FLAT. Adjusted.
(4) SOAID (Stellar Occultations AID) now works in a pretty rational way. Crosses now appear when zoom factor is greater than 50 and the SOAID activation is indicated at the bottom right of the graphical screen.
(5) Simplified the object change into the “Search for Planets Alignments” tool. Now a more rational combo-box does the job.
(6) Heliacal Events Tool : now the grid is correctly cleaned after a new “Compute” call.
(7) Heliacal Events Tool : the object involved with a “Go to Selected Event” is now tracked automatically.
(8) General Options : labels of modern / historical / observatories sites (STEREOGRAPHIC Earth View) can be deactivated in order to obtain more readable maps.
(9) When the Application is started, next solar and lunar eclipses are not linked. They will appear though in case the corresponding Navigator is activated.
(10) Asteroids: secondary data source is no more the Lowell Observatory. Their ftp site is awfully slow so I decided to acquire data from Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) that is at the same speed level of Minor Planet Center.
(11) Main Menu: the item “Show” has been splitted into “Show”, “Small Bodies” and “Canons”.
Show Small Bodies Canons
Solar System Jupiter's Moons General Solar Eclipses
Mean Elements of Planets Saturn's Moons Lunar Eclipses
Stars Database Asteroids Transits of Mercury
Deep Sky Database Comets Transits of Venus
Horizon Profile Planets Mutual Transits
Miscellaneous
(12) Main Menu: the item “Canons” contains a new sub-item, called “Miscellaneous”, containing new data about planets. Least distances from Earth, elongations of Mercury and Venus, perihelions, aphelions and nodes of the outer planets (Pluto included, claiming its dignity as SS planet) usually from 1600 up to 2100 CE, except Mercury and Venus. All data are geocentric and were computed by means of the DE440/DE441 UrukFSP’s computing engine.
(13) Added one item into Useful Links Menu: JPL Solar System Dynamics (https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov).
(14) EQUATORIAL VIEW : Added to the Asteroid’s tracking info the physical diameter (Km) and its distance from Earth (Millions kilometers).
(15) Now from the popup menu of EARTH views it’s possible to gain access to both Orthographic Views, that is the Earth as seen by the Sun center or Moon center.
(16) Eclipse Window (bottom right of the main window) : if the Sun is below the dipped horizon no images are drawn, data only. The background color is changes as well.
(17) – NEW TOOL : this tool computes the least topocentric distances between the Moon and a selected planet occurred during a year. Of course occultations are put in evidence. Even though the two bodies are below the horizon, going to the event and moving the “Time Flow” until we reach rise or set we could find an interesting configuration.
(18) – NEW TOOL : this new tool computes all the stars occulted by the Moon (up to mag 8.0) during a year at a selected location (CURRLOC). Number crunching is remarkable for this task, so it could take even a couple of hours if you select a limit of mag = 8 and you live at high latitudes (yeah, because computation time depends on latitude as well). The good news in this case are that you probably will need to run such a computation once in a year and then save the grid into a file. If you are doing an archaeoastronomical research you may want to select bright stars only (less than mag. 3) so the calculation time will be considerably shorter. Of course a fast computer helps, ça va sans dire. 😜
(19) NEW CANONS : three separate canons, generated by the UrukFSP computing engine, to show planetary trios, quadruplets and quintuplets occurred from BCE 3000 to CE 3000, into a circle of 5°, 10° and 20° respectively. These data are very useful for researchers, but not easy to find even though a famous paper by J. Meeus and S. De Meis was published 30 year ago. J.Meeus talks about this topic in his “Astronomical Morsels I” as well.
(20) CANON OF LUNAR ECLIPSES : altitudes of Moon during U1 (first umbra contact), GE (greatest eclipse) and U4 (last umbra contact) referred to the Current Location (CURRLOC) are now computed and shown just to figure out at first sight what will be visible and what won’t. Penumbral eclipses haven’t been considered as they have no historical relevance (even the modern ones actually 🤗). Altitudes appear only if the data subset (BCE 3000 – CE 3000 has been selected).
(21) GEOCENTRIC FLAG : UrukFSP can activate a geocentric representation of the sky. This can be useful sometimes for checking out differences of position of objects having a relevant parallax, but forgetting this flag activated could be a big problem, so I decided to warn the user painting red the Coordinates Panel as long as this option is on.
(22) SE and LE NAVIGATORS : computing year input box now reacts to the ENTER key, so the APPLY button has disappeared.
(23) SOLAR SYSTEM WINDOW : background turned into white. This color is usually much more suitable for embedding an image like this into a document. Also inserted the position of the most massive asteroids.
(24) CANON OF MUTUAL TRANSITS : after thirty years or so I recomputed this canon extending the time range from BCE 10000 to CE 10000. A lot of number crunching, believe me. This time I took into account the fact that a transit can’t be found by a geocentric computation, but due to the parallax of planets, a place on the Earth’s surface where the transit occurs could exist, as the bottom help panel shows. Also I included phenomena where there is no transit at all but the distance between the two planets is so small ( 2 * (SD1 + SD2) ) that with the naked eye can be seen as an overlap of the two objects. Justice is done to John Bevis 😜
2024 January 2 – Patched version 1.3.5A
If you have already downloaded v. 1.3.5 please update to this version
1) Version 1.3.5 was compiled and delivered with redundant debug code inside and no compiler optimisations.
2) When outside of EQT, HOR or ASM View, STAR Catalogue is disabled for speed reasons. If the user enters into the Star Catalogue asking info about stars after changing computing date had a warning message on the window title that catalogue is not up to date. Now the user can’t access data until EQT, HOR or ASM are selected, just to avoid problems.
3) Diurnal aberration applied to stars can be excluded (for speed reasons) and normally it is. If you need a strictly rigorous apparent position of stars you can enable it via the options menu.
4) Just a note. Data grids containing a “Go to event” button into the form can use a mouse “double click” on the selected row to perform the same task.
2024 January 5 – Patched version 1.3.5B
New and hopefully the last patch for this release. This time I have solved a problem with the stellar catalogue. Over long period of time (say 10000 BCE) computation of stellar proper motion where radial velocity was involved gave a notable difference in case of stars having huge proper motions values (pmRA, pmDE). The star Toliman (Alp2 Cen) was used as a test star and the software Orion as reference software.
New version will be possibly released on DEC 22, day of the Winter Solstice.
NOTE : if you already have an earlier version of UrukFSP the new location file will not overwrite your local file contained into UrukFSP_USR/Locations. If you want the new file to be installed you have to rename the one already present into the above path. Location files are plain text files, so if you added a lot of new locations in your renamed file they can be transferred via copy and paste.
NOTE : Unlike most programs, in UrukFSP moving in the EQT, HOR and STEREOGRAPHIC EARTH VIEW windows doesn’t require holding down the left mouse button and dragging it to the destination. Simply click the left mouse button on the new position that needs to be placed at the center of the window. Alternatively, it is possible to rotate the current window by moving the mouse over the boxes indicating AR, DEC, ALT, AZM, LON, LAT if enabled, and acting on the mouse wheel. This can be done in steps of 10°, 1°, 1′, 1″.
Hi
Can’t wait for the Winter solstice to test all the new features of version 1.3.5.
According to a new article : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00218286231209030
at the epoch 1133 AD, ∆T is in the range +720 <ΔT<+1110 seconds.
Using recalibrated ∆T, according to UrukFSP 1.3.4, ∆T is 963 seconds…
Only few days left for the (319) Leona / HIP 27989 event on 2023 Dec 12 : what will be the difference between the actual observation and the predictions? This will be interesting!
Regards.
Hi,
I’ve just added to the changelog a new tool computing stellar occultations by the Moon and a very interesting set of data about planetary groupings. That should be very interesting for researchers.
Regards
AC
Buonasera.
La imminente versione 1.3.5 è aggiornata al recente studio delle effemeridi DE440 e DE441 ottenute nella ricerca: “Ryan S. Park , William M. Folkner , James G. Williams , and Dale H. Boggs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109-8099, USA; Ryan.S.Park@jpl.nasa.gov Received 2020 November 11; revised 2020 December 8; accepted 2020 December 15; published 2021 February 8″?
Grazie
Cordiali saluti
Buonasera,
sì, il documento a cui si riferisce è il paper di presentazione dei modelli teorici in questione, che può trovare per esteso nella sezione “External Links”. UrukFSP usa già da diverso tempo i modelli DE440 e DE441.
Cordiali saluti
AC