À propos du soleil de ptaff.ca/Historique (english)
This article describe the history of the soleil of ptaff.ca web page.
Sommaire
Introduction[modifier]
Note: Soleil is the french word for Sun,
Somewhere in 2004 on the road between Montreal and Chicoutimi, I had an argument with the driver of the car. The topic of the argument: the sunset and sunrise time difference between Montreal and Chicoutimi.
As often, I went on the internet to find an answer to our questions. I did find some sites, but nothing that could easily help me to compare the sunrise and sunset time for those 2 places.
I knew that I could create a software to help me to find the answer. I had already worked, within the software project METRo, with the script Sun.py written by Henrik Härkönen. This script gives the sunrise and sunset time for a given day at a specified latitude and longitude.
All that was missing was a list of cities with their corresponding geographical coordinates, to compute the sunrise and sunset time for every day of the year and to put everyting on a graphical format (for more details, see the Software used section).
With the proper tools and the knowledge in hands, I then coded the crepyscule software and Patrice Levesque created the soleil web page.
Project description[modifier]
The soleil web page allow to visualize graphics, tables and to download files for any places on the globe. The following output are calculated:
- Sunrise
- Sunset
- Time of light
- Daily variation of light
- Daily maximum altitude of sun
- Daily maximum solar flux
- Twilight length
It also allows to compare 2 places.
The soleil web page of ptaff.ca is an original idea of Miguel Tremblay, co-produced by the edimaster Patrice Levesque.
All the output are computed by the crepyscule software, written by Miguel Tremblay. The graphics, lists and files are created with the help of Table4Chart library, written by Patrice Levesques.
This page is a guide for the web page http://ptaff.ca/soleil/ . You can also find a page about its interface to get the graphics as well as their description.
Chronology[modifier]
- 2004: Original idea.
- Augusth 14 2005: Release of the crepyscule software and the web page soleil.
- March 2005: Add the computation of the maximum altitude of the sun on the web page and in the Sun.py script.
- Setpember 25 2006: add the coordinates of 475 Canadian cities to the kstars list.
- January 31 2006: add the picture given by Thierry Lombry as background image for the soleil web page.
- March 2007: add the graphic showing the daily variation (derivate) of time light.
- November 2007: add the graphic of the daily maximal solar flux.
- January 2008: text file(s) as output of crepyscule (crepyscule version 1.0)
- January 2008: Add the new summer time dates for Canada and US.
- June 2008: installation of the brand new library Table4Chart for the graphics creation.
- September 7 2009: add the graphic of twilight
- December 2009 (TBC): Release of the help pages.
What the people have done with this data[modifier]
Along the years, many people have contacted me to have more information about the soleil web page of ptaff.ca. Moreover, many pages on forums or site point to the soleil web page.
The motivation to know the exact time of sunrise and sunset are very diversified and show the importance of this astronomical object in our lifes.
Here is a list of field of reasons why people took interest at this page:
- (fr) Travel destination (October 2006)
- (fr) Canaries breeding (December 2006)
- Lettuce growing (personal communication, March 2007)
- Marijuana culture (April 2007)
- Daily prayer of muslims (personal communication, June 2007)
- Wedding at Las Vegas (personal communication, November 2007)
- Engineering class(personal communication, December 2007)
- Ovine reproduction (personal communication, January 2008)
- Mathematics courses (personal communication, May 2008)
- (fr) Legal hours for hunting (octobre 2008)
Software used[modifier]
For the list of cities, we look in the free software field and we've found the list of the kstars software, a planetarium program being a part of the [KDE education project]. We have contributed to the addition of 475 Canadian cities to the list of this software.
Values are computed with the crepyscule software.
Graphics, tables and CSV files are created with the Table4Chart library.
