First Light / Last Light

[Chris Attkins]

This weather thing is a whole new voyage of discovery for me, so again, please forgive my ignorance.

A number of people who stay at our guest house ask when ‘first light’ will be... some to go stalking, others to begin working out of doors. Visitors climbing the mountains find it really helpful to know when it will get dark so they can plan their day’s exertions. So you know what my next question will be!

I just looked up a website that calculates these times for any latitude and longitude:

http://www.weatherimages.org/latlonsun.html

and again wonder about the practicalities of automating the inclusion of this information on the webpages?

Any suggestions for achieving this will be welcome.

Thanks.

[steve]

Cumulus gives sunrise and sunset times, so you could get a reasonable approximation from those.

Steve

[Chris Attkins]

Thanks for your immediate response Steve. Actually there is a marked variation between first light and sunrise as the year progresses. At the moment it’s 37 minutes, but in June it will be an hour!

Since this is evidently calculable, it would be great to display the data.

Can you suggest a link to one of the sites incorporating your realtime.txt datafile so I can see how this is done? Then I can set about writing a driver to upload such information.

Thanks again.

[steve]

In that case, wouldn't it be easier to use the new facility in Cumulus?

http://sanday.org.uk/weather/index.htm

I've used Civil Twilight. But the web page needs a bit of work now to accommodate the new data - any suggestions, anyone?

Steve

[Chris Attkins]

Well Steve, what can I say? I’m still incredulous that you’ve written that code in minutes!

If you worked for the government the UK would already be out of recession.

Thank you very much indeed.

Cheers,

Chris

[steve]

I just have to sort out the layout of my web pages now; it looks OK on my widescreen, but not very good on my little 1024x768.

And also work out a way to get it onto the Cumulus screen; it might as well be on there.

Steve

[Chris Attkins]

Perhaps it might make sense to separate out the weather station location details from the day’s details? That way the webpage width can be maintained.

[beteljuice]

Steve - you've pretty much circumvented a sh*t load of work in progress, and ruined several versions of 'default' Cumulus Templates I was working on
I've even got one where the Sun moves across the 'visible' window in direct relationship to the daylight hour (now I shall have to consider if I do anything about twilight )

I shall probably carry on regardless for my own peace of mind - I like things logically presented.
(Moon rise / set in correct time order, Sun / moon will rise / did rise etc.)

Dawn started :06:06
Sunrise was 06:40
Sunset today: 18:00
Dusk ends: 18:34 - 12:28 hrs daylight

Moon rose yesterday at 14:46 and
set today at 05:49 then rises at 16:14.
Current altitude is -20° (Below horizon)
and azimuth 39° NE by N.
The disk is now 97% illuminated (Waxing).
Next Full Moon on 11 March at 02:36.
Next New Moon on 26 March at 16:09

By the way the time is 13:29 and it's day (Light)

Presentation changes again after Sunset / twilight (also gives tomrrows rise), changes again after midnight (tomorrows become today etc.) etc. etc.


I've got to ask, what does it do with DST, especially when (in your case current Moon), request time, or rise time, or set time may straddle GMT offset (effectively different TZ) ?

[Chris Attkins]

Oh dear...

It just goes to show you can’t please all the people, all the time!

I for one am delighted though, as will be many thousands of visitors to these websites, who plan their activities according to being able to see.

Keep up the good work Steve!

[steve]

I've got to ask, what does it do with DST, especially when (in your case current Moon), request time, or rise time, or set time may straddle GMT offset (effectively different TZ) ?

I think it will use whatever is in force at the time. So if you look just after midnight on the day BST (for example) begins, it will give the times for that day in GMT. If you look again a few hours later, the times will have changed to BST. Arguably not correct, but I don't feel inclined to change it.

Steve

[beteljuice]

Oh dear...
It just goes to show you can’t please all the people, all the time!

The beteljuice did not say he was displeased

.. I think it will use whatever is in force at the time.

I know that feeling

.. Arguably not correct, but I don't feel inclined to change it.

Fair enough !

[Chris Attkins]

The beteljuice did not say he was displeased

Thank goodness for that! I thought I might have caused disharmony in my first foray into the weatherworld, so am mightily relieved!

[steve]

I've uploaded build 794, which has the new web tags: <#dawn>, <#dusk> and <#daylightlength>

I've also been playing with the standard pages (with some input from beteljuice) and incorporated these tags.

See here for how the supplied pages now look. Note that the 'almanac' data (sunrise etc) now only appears on index.htm.

Steve

[Chris Attkins]

That’s brilliant! Thank you very much for responding immediately to my request for this additional data.
The redesigned pages look great.

[GTB]

i like it Steve

geoff