Normally blog entries here are written days in advance, so when I have busy days things continue as usual. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been very busy, hence the lack of blogging. On the plus side I have had some help from other people who found me some time saving tools.
Mick Morrison has been reading the Google Earth EULA, like we all did before we clicked ‘accept’. He points out that the guidelines on the Google site say:
You may use Google Maps and Google Earth content including photographic imagery in brochures, marketing collateral, packaging, trade show displays/banners, newspapers, academic publications, journals, and books.
Quite reasonably he’s asking why they aren’t being used in academic publications. The answer in my case is that it didn’t occur to me that getting permission would be simple. I’ll be using the maps in my thesis now.
The other big time-savers are the applets from The Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project. What I need to do is create some diagrams like the one below showing how apparent star paths change with latitude, how the sunrises over different parts of the horizon at different times of the year, and so on. The NAAP Astronomy Labs have put together some really useful tools for this, so now I can include images like this one:
Paths of the stars over Sicily.
If you visit their site you’ll see the outputs are bigger, better quality with vector graphics and interactive so you can animate them. They’re very kindly allowing me to use prints, which will save me a lot of time and frustration with my graphics tablet.
Now all I need is some affordable way of creating circular histograms on a Mac. Suggestions are welcome.
