Introducing Data Wizard (Data | Data Wizard)

TheSky6’s Data Wizard is a powerful tool for working with the numerous data types present in TheSky6. With the Data Wizard, you can perform many different tasks such as:

• Create custom reports of various celestial objects properties. Examples include creating a list of all large and bright galaxies and nebula currently above the horizon, or show me all NGC objects in the constellation Orion, sorted by size.

• Create ephemeredes of solar system objects such as “show me the rise and set times of all planets for each day of the month," or "what interesting objects are out tonight?"

• Scroll through data lists and display pictures of objects as they are highlighted. For example you could create a list of all galaxies larger than 10 arcminutes in size, then sort them by size. Using the Frame Object option, show a picture of each one as the list is scrolled.

• Generate Observatory Scripts for use with Orchestrate such as extracting the coordinate data from the Mosaic tool and creating a script that will take a CCD Image at each position.

• Export data to a text file or to the clipboard.

• Draw paths between the objects in a data list.

• Label objects in a data list.

Data Queries

A data query is a set of instructions that direct TheSky6 to search selected databases for the requested information. Each query consists of a number of parameters that will determine the output.

These parameters include:

• Where to search for the data. Searches can be confined to only objects currently on the display or to entire catalogs of objects.

• What object types should be included in the search (for example, nebula, galaxies, open clusters).

• What attributes must the objects have to be included in the report (magnitudes, angular sizes, etc.)

• What attributes should be included in the report (for example, show magnitude, size and equatorial or horizon-based coordinates).

Object Attributes

Each celestial object type has some number of attributes that are available for reporting. Some attributes such as coordinates and magnitude are common to many object types, while other attributes such as “Satellite range” are applicable only to a single object type.

Creating a New Query

One way to learn about Data Queries and Reports is to start with queries supplied with TheSky6 and make incremental changes to them, each time running the query to see how the changes effects the report.