Attilla Danko's
Boring Home Page

Just the Links

Off Site:
BigDob
Ottawa Astronomy Friends

Clear Dark Sky / Clear Sky Charts Update

As some of you may know, Attilla Danko died 2024-11-28.

Many of you are wondering what will happen to the Clear Sky Chart Forecasts, so I thought I'd share what I know.

Attilla wrote the code to do forecasts for himself, but then decided to share similar forecasts with anyone who wanted them. He made a hobby out of looking for what cloud forecasts he could find and trying to compare their accuracy. He'd find other useful links and add them to forecasts - but sometimes only the sponsored forecasts.

He organized a letter writing campaign that helped Environment Canada decide to make the cloud forecasts a formal product - he would never have been able to do these charts without Allan Rahill's invaluable contribution, which we will forever be grateful for.

He fully expected that within a few years of him starting his forecasts, someone else would do a better job and take over forecasting.

And yet... people kept wanting his forecasts.

But because he always expected someone else to put him out of business, he never productized his code.

When he first became ill, I asked him about the succession plan for cleardarksky and he told me it should die with him. I didn't agree. I asked him to consider letting someone else take over, but he wasn't really trying hard to make that happen.

It was only while he was in hospital early October 2024, that he finally agreed to show me how to do the most basic things, like add a sponsorship or a new chart. Since then, I've been doing that maintenance. (I'm the "colleagues" he refers to below - we never did get anyone else on board). We did agree that to reduce the workload, the site should be demonetized, which happened late November.

However, he was too ill to give me a full guided tour of the code. And looking at the folders, there are still personal financial files and emails intertwingled, so I can't just zip it and offer the code to other people. Because of this, please don't ask me how you can help: I haven't been able to think of anything appropriate that other people can do at this time, and it sucks to have to tell people this one by one.

I can - and will - continue to create new charts (but maybe not as fast as Attilla did). The generation code is automated, so as long as nothing goes wrong (or changes), forecasts will continue to be created. But I have a complex estate to settle now, and it will be quite some time before I will have time (and energy) to try to sort through 20+ years of unproductized code development (including stale files and other surprises) and learn enough python to figure out how to package the code for handoff. Hopefully I'll be able to get to this before something breaks, but no guarantees.

-Ingrid

I've left Attilla's original description about the charts here below.

Colleagues

Me

I never had a use for a personal website until I heard about the computer language Python. I figured any language named after Monty Python's Flying Circus had to be cool. But to learn Python, I needed a problem to write code for. I found it tedious to add 5 in my head to convert UTC to EST in using the astronomy forecast maps at CMC, so I started writing code.

Next thing I know, I'm writing optical character recognition code, reverse-engineering map transforms, writing javascripts and web databases, writing failover and load-sharing code for windows and generating Clear Sky Charts. Because of the very cool numerical model Allan Rahill (of CMC) wrote, the Clear Sky Charts turn out to be just about the most accurate forecasting device for astronomers. Then word got around.

I'm generating clear sky charts for >3000+ observatories and observing sites in North America and having an absolute blast. I wish knew how to turn clear sky charts into a livelihood so I could do it full time.

There are a few other things on this website that largely came about from the charts:

• I wrote the Ottawa Astronomy Weather page to explain to my fellow observers in Ottawa why the local forecasts were so bad and where to get real astronomer's forecasts.

• I wrote the Seeing Observations Database so Allan Rahill could get real data on astronomical seeing in order to tune his numerical seeing model.

• I answer a lot of email. In a pitiful attempt to stem the flood, here are some of the questions i've answered:
  • How to buy a telescope.

And then there is just plain sillyness:

• Many fine nights observing with buddies, who were also Monty Python fans, cause me to write (in a moment of weakness), a translation of the classic monty python sketch, The Four Observers, into the language of amateur astronomers.

• Many fine nights observing with buddies who like to express themselves led me to realize that one could rate astronomical views by listening to people swear at the eyepiece. In another moment of weakness (is there a pattern here?), I wrote the Expletive Scale (Not suitable for kids) of astronomical observations.

I've come to appreciate the social aspects of the astronomy hobby. So I deliberately created a few places where astronomers could yak:

• The BigDob (big dobsonian telescopes) mailing list.
• The Astronomy Weather mailing list.
• The Ottawa Astronomy FriendS mailing list for by observing buddies who say Ni!.
• My rabid-opinions page on telescopes and weather on the OAFs wiki.