Has anyone tried applying a Traveling Salesman algorithm? You'd want to choose the
metric wisely, perhaps including a penalty for jumping between chart pages. The result
would be a list in an order which is efficient in terms of navigating from one object
to the next.
mam
Christopher Hays wrote:
>
> I'm confused, Mark.
>
> Which, if either, is the different way you would do it if you were to
> start over?
>
> Christopher
>
> Mark Wagner wrote:
>
> > At 1/29/2004, you wrote:
> >
> >> I should have said "strict RA order" or "naive RA order". Maybe I'm
> >> the only one dumb enough to have actually done this. I'm sure you
> >> really do them in what might be called "sophisticated RA order", which
> >> takes into account relative locality and also doing the more Southern
> >> ones first, because they will be gone sooner.
> >>
> >> The problem with strict RA order, which became obvious to me only after
> >> my initial rookie year(s) is that you keep bouncing wildly North to
> >> South, with the resulting telescope movements, chart page flipping,
> >> etc. Not to mention losing the leverage of having the immediate local
> >> "knowledge" of the area you've just hopped around. It finally dawned
> >> on me after about the 10th time that I went from object A to B to C and
> >> found out that objects A and B were in the same field of view, but
> >> object C was 90 degrees away from them! It takes some people longer
> >> than others to learn these lessons, I guess.
> >
> >
> > Oh.... yes.... that is right. I pick out a 2 hour RA window, then
> > sort them north to south.
> >
> > On my H2500, they are sorted by diminishing mag then RA, within
> > constellations. I would do it differently if I were to start over.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >