2020-11-19, 05:39 PM
(This post was last modified: 2020-11-19, 06:29 PM by theskyhound.)
Hi Phil & Owen,
I saw this myself recently and I'm looking into it now. The magnitude is in error, especially if you look several months into the future.
In ST4, I implemented a complicated scheme for handling novae and supernovae. Its probably the coolest (or perhaps the "nerdiest") part of ST4. Very few people are even aware of it. The root of the idea was that large numbers of supernovae are being discovered these days, and I wanted to add them to SkyTools and plot them on the charts. The problem is that after a while, the supernova fades but SkyTools 3 will still show it. SkyTools 3 would also show it long before it brightened. So what ST4 does is to assign a "light curve" to each of these stars based on one or more samples of its magnitude and a generic curve that most stars of this type follow. The magnitude of the star at any time is determined from the light curve. So if you come back three years after the supernova, it will have faded in SkyTools such that it will no longer be visible. It does the same thing with classical novae, like RX And.
There are a lot of variables in this system (pun intended) and even though I have watched the results for several years now, and it has been working fine, apparently RX And has broken it somehow. I am doing fixes this week, and there should be an update with a fix for this soon.
By the way--try looking at Taurus in January of 1055 AD!
I saw this myself recently and I'm looking into it now. The magnitude is in error, especially if you look several months into the future.
In ST4, I implemented a complicated scheme for handling novae and supernovae. Its probably the coolest (or perhaps the "nerdiest") part of ST4. Very few people are even aware of it. The root of the idea was that large numbers of supernovae are being discovered these days, and I wanted to add them to SkyTools and plot them on the charts. The problem is that after a while, the supernova fades but SkyTools 3 will still show it. SkyTools 3 would also show it long before it brightened. So what ST4 does is to assign a "light curve" to each of these stars based on one or more samples of its magnitude and a generic curve that most stars of this type follow. The magnitude of the star at any time is determined from the light curve. So if you come back three years after the supernova, it will have faded in SkyTools such that it will no longer be visible. It does the same thing with classical novae, like RX And.
There are a lot of variables in this system (pun intended) and even though I have watched the results for several years now, and it has been working fine, apparently RX And has broken it somehow. I am doing fixes this week, and there should be an update with a fix for this soon.
By the way--try looking at Taurus in January of 1055 AD!
Clear skies,
Greg
Head Dude at Skyhound
Greg
Head Dude at Skyhound