Oh good grief! Stressed by back to front dates...
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Fuzzy Logic | Discussion: Life, the Universe and Everything
A few days ago (the 4th) we had some clear skies (yay! no cloud!) so I got my telescope out to do some stargazing. The mount is one of these clever goto things, you type in your location, time, date etc, select some alignment stars and away you go. Just type in what you want to look at and the scope 'goes to' it.
So, I selected Arcturus as my first alignment star. Scope slewed off in completely the wrong direction. Tried again, no joy. Switched everything off and on, re-entered all the data, still pointing in the wrong direction.
It took me 50 minutes of cussing the damn thing before I relised the scope was pointing to where Arcturus would have been in April...
You guessed, I typed the date in as 04 08 2010, that is, the 4th of August 2010... The 'effin thing thought it was the 8th of April... Grrrrr!
To the dumb twit who programmed this goto, I would like to point out time goes: seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years in that order. Any other way is like counting to ten and going: 1 2 3 4 5 7 6 8 9 10 - doesn't compute...
Pointing telescopes aint like dusting crops boy...
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Reply #21 Thursday, August 12, 2010 4:12 AM
You would think people who programmed software would understand logic. Plus you have to accept industry standards and not go off and do your own thing.
It's probably the same knobs who lost the Mars Climate Orbiter because they fed in imperial measurements instead of metric... $165m down the (Martian) toilet...