- About Me
- Work Homepage
- My CV
- My Schedule
- My Blog
- Classes
- Astronomy 104 (on D2L)
- Physics 161L (on D2L)
- Physics 306 (on D2L)
- Physics 322
- Physics 350
- Research
- Cabanela Research
- Juan's REU List
- My Research Interests (PDF file)
- The Asymmetric Thick Disk Project
- External SPECROAD
- The MSUM Archive of the MAPS Catalog
- The MAPS-NGP Catalog
- Ph.D. Thesis (1999)
- Useful Astronomy Info
- F-M Weather Info
- Astronomy News
- Clear Sky Clock Widget
- Contacting the Congress
- Site Map
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(Above image courtesy of ClearDarkSky.com) |
In mid-2001, Attilla
Danko, a software designer for Nortel Networks in Canada
hit upon a brilliant idea:
Using data from the Canadian Meteorological Center, I created highly-specialized
weather forecasts for astronomers for over 1400 observatories and observing sites
across North America. [...] ClearDarkSky has become the premier weather forecasting
service to its audience.
An example of a Clear Sky Chart forecast
is shown above. The most important line to astronomers is typically the first
colored line which shows the forecast cloud cover for the next two days, which
is why some astronomers refer to the diagram as the "Clear Sky
Clock."
In September of 2005, Joshua Lynch released a Dashboard widget
for the Mac (MacOS X 10.4.3 or later) that would display the "Clear Sky Clock"
on the Dashboard of the MacOS. However, it had a bug with parsing clear
sky chart weather stations that prevented our campus observatory's site from
being selectable for display. After discovering the widget was relased under
the GNU General Public License, I set about remedying this problem and with
the original author's permission, adding new features to the widget.
Download current version
of Clear Sky Clock widget (Version 1.5)
New Features
The key new features I added
since Joshua Lynch's version 1.0 release of the Clear Sky Clock widget are:
- Proper parsing of weather station names with periods and parentheses in
their names.
-
Half-size mode: Click on the "Toggle Size" link
on the screen and the widget will switch between full-size and half-size.
When a widget is half-sized it occupies one-quarter of the area and is
still readable:
-
Built-in Legend: If you click on the clear sky chart image,
a legend will appear underneath, describing the meaning of the various colors
on the clear-sky chart. Click on the clear sky chart image again, the legend
disappears. The legend looks something like this:
This software is released under the GNU General Public License.
Version History
Version 1.5 (October 3, 2011) [Download here]
- Released by Juan Cabanela
- Added support for site names with accented characters. I fixed a problem that prevented sites with non-ASCII characters, such as those accented characters in French and Spanish site names, from showing up. The name may not look correct in the pull down menu with a diamond where the accented character should be, but the site will work.
Version 1.4 (August 11, 2011)
- Released by Juan Cabanela
- Fixed an apparent incompatibility with Snow Leopard and Lion. Version 1.3 would not properly parse the list of locations in a state and would return no choices. This made it impossible to use this widget without some preferences hacking (or having set it up BEFORE the glitch was introduced... which is why I didn't see it. I had configured under Leopard and thus the widget continued to work fine.
Version 1.3 (October 13, 2008)
- Released by Juan Cabanela
- Built-in Legend: After an emailed discussion with Attilla
Danko, the creator of Clear
Sky Charts, I have gotten formal permission to include his code for
the legend in this version of the widget. If you click on the clear sky
chart image, a legend will appear underneath, describing the meaning of
the various colors on the clear-sky chart.
- Built-in Link to Clear Sky Chart Site Page: When you
are displaying a clear sky chart for a given ground station, a link is present
at the bottom of the page which will take you to the Clear
Sky Chart webpage
for this ground station, allowing you to view much more detailed information
about how the forecast was developed (and clicking on his version of the
Clear Sky Chart actually brings up the "future" cloud cover maps
which can be quite illuminating).
Version 1.2 (October 10, 2008)
- Beta-testing version by Juan Cabanela. Never publically released.
- New Widget Icon
- Half-size mode: Click on the "Toggle Size" link
on the screen and the widget will switch between full-size and half-size.
This saves considerable screen real estate.
Version 1.1 (October 8, 2008)
- Beta-testing version by Juan Cabanela. Never publically released.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the loading of any Clear Sky Chart for sites
containing parentheses or periods in their names.
- Removed "Copyright" statements, since the common interpretation of Copyright
is inconsistent with the GNU General Public license. This move was made with
Joshua Lynch's permission.
Version 1.0 (September 25, 2005)
- Released by Joshua Lynch
- Loads Clear Sky Chart to MacOS Dashboard.
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