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

Yesterday the students in Computer Science making their thesis in astronomy software actually called me at the office. It's a bad precedent. Text on simple matters I can take because at least (like e-mail) they can save the message and read it over and over again until my answers to their queries become clear. On a phone call, parts of a long conversation, no matter how important may be forgotten or given less emphasis depending on what either or both parties remember. So unless it is recorded, I do not prefer giving instructions to students over the phone.

They said that one of their panelists had seen their software (during a stargazing session? I'm not sure) and were told that the stars in their starmap were too small. I don't understand how big that panelist of theirs thinks the stars look in the sky, especially if that was during a stargazing session.

But that wasn't the student's main question. What they wanted to know was should the planets in their starmap also grow when the field is enlarged (just like in the commercial software we are using as a model) or would that only frustrate the amateur astronomers using their program who did not have telescopes.

I told them to just put the planets in circles with their initials. That should be recognizable enough without giving the users any falst expectations on how the planets would look like in the sky, even zoomed up.

They even asked me if I knew when I'd be free to meet with them, and the earliest I could tell them was next week.

Last night, on my way home, they also texted me asking if the partial graph of the path of the moon for March that I sent them by e-mail before was also applicable for all the other months. I said that it wasn't (as I could already guess from the behavior of the tides and the ecliptic during the solstices and the equinoxes.

I also cleared their misconception that they only have to look at the times from sunset to sunrise, when in fact the moon is visible at all times of the day in the course of one month.

My first thought was that again they were trying to cut corners in their work, and that wasn't acceptable.

A few minutes later I received another text, asking if the graphs for the same month in different years also varied. I could have answered that with a yes, but I realized it was something the students actually had the capacity to find out for themselves, and again they were taking the easy way out.

So I just said that I didn't know, and they will have to graph the path of the moon for last year and/or next year to find out.

I guess that just like with the time-adjustable star map, wherein twenty-four screen shots may be used for any time of night, they are also thinking of making the graphs for one year pass for all the other years, instead of letting the program plot it for them from the computations of the other astronomy thesis I gave them before.

I don't know if their panelists will know the difference enough to detect. But since I personally have started graphing the path of the moon for different months of the year, I really don't need them to have it as part of their software anymore. I can't tell them that though, or tell them to scrap that objective.