User talk:Wikibob

Hi there. Welcome to Wikipedia! Thanks for your contribution at Claude François. Why don't you drop us a note at Wikipedia:New user log so we can meet you and help you get started?

If you need editing help, visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page. For format questions, visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. You can also drop me a question on my talk page.

Happy editing, Isomorphic 22:43, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. I'm glad to see someone working on the MER-A timeline. Perl 21:34, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hosers

Thanks for the heads-up. I had already found this, but forgot I still had a live question out there. Actually I prefer the style of GPF: Hosers now comes across as too consciously "roughly drawn". Which do you prefer? --Phil 08:04, Mar 3, 2004 (UTC)

Messages

I award you this barnstar for your conversion of the MER timelines. A table of contents is very helpful. The star is rusty and has pointy edges so don't accidently poke your eyes out or cut yourself! (Tetanus isn't very pleasant.) Perl 21:41, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks!Wikibob 00:32, 2004 Mar 2 (UTC)

Nomination

Perl has nominated you for administrator status on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship, but I can't tell whether he told you about it, so I wanted to make sure you were aware. You're supposed to go to that page to accept or decline the nomination. Since you're still fairly new here, I'm not sure if this nomination is going to be widely supported. Personally, I would suggest you decline the nomination and wait until you have more experience here, but that's just friendly advice - I don't mean to be telling you what to do. --Michael Snow 17:11, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Falklands Maps

Did you make those maps for the Battle of Goose Green? If so, could you possibly make further maps, if you have the time, and if its not asking too much, for the other battles which have been written?

Newspaper links

The newspaper links are heading for the wrong papers: looks like the BBC don't have a set link for each paper, they have a different set each day!

Thanks, answered on User talk:Sam Francis -Wikibob

Transit of Deimos from Mars

You have to enter

Spirit@499 or Opportunity@499 for the observer location, and Deimos is 402.

It's not exactly a user-friendly interface.

For the table options, I used 4,5,13,23,34

I think 34 is the local solar time

The discrepancy could be due to the Martian equivalent of the equation of time. Maybe they're using mean solar time instead of true solar time.

-- Curps 22:28, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Here's some useful links for telling time on Mars:

The technical notes links (2nd above) says that Spirit and Opportunity mission time is an "offset modification of an evenly advancing mean solar time", whatever that means. The difference between lander mission time and local solar time should be up to 40 minutes or so; however, I believe the times for the photographs were specifically given as local solar time.

Probably it's important to keep strictly to local solar time, because on Mars things like temperature vary greatly up and down in strict synchronicity with the Sun (with no water or atmosphere to buffer temperature changes), and that affects all aspects of lander operations. Maybe "lander mission time" is simply what's kept by those fancy custom watches they had made.

-- Curps 19:54, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I created a Time and date on Mars article, with some of the info above.

Regarding transits, I found a citation for Transits of Mars I and II [1] at IAU Circ., 8298, 2 (2004). However, attemping to look up this IAUC online says "not yet issued" (which makes no sense since they're up to 8359).

If by any chance you have access to IAU Circulars, perhaps looking this up will help clear up some of the mystery of the divergent times.

-- Curps 08:22, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the DVI link for the IAU Circular. I used dvipdf to convert it. Unfortunately, the text is only half a page and pretty much what you managed to decode: they give times of March 4.12773, 4.12785, 4.12819, which corresponds to 3h 3m 55.9s, 3h 4m 06.2s, 3h 4m 35.6s, but it seems that can't be right because it implies a span of 40 seconds between the first and last (fourth) images rather than 30 seconds. They don't give the local solar times.

-- Curps 20:22, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I added comments to Talk:Transit of Deimos from Mars.

I calculated the UTC times of all the transit images for the two transits of Deimos and the three transits of Phobos based on the filename timestamp, and added the information to the Image pages (such as Image:Deimos Mar 13 2004 from Opportunity 1.jpg).

The main problem, I think, is that the start time for Sol 38 given as 08:13 PST must be rounded to the nearest minute. According to JPL Horizons, the local apparent solar time of 00:00 corresponded 16:16:26.504 UTC, but no doubt they're using some form of mean solar time for the mission, otherwise every sol would be a different length. It would be good to know the formula to convert from UTC to local mean solar time as used by Opportunity.

-- Curps 04:15, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Wik's user page

Regarding your edit summary: rv per Jimbo Wales wishes "It is my intention that Wik's user pages be left alone, in their current state, i.e. with the simple message above. Please do not harass him or continue this petty fight..." -- Jimbo wrote this when Wik was trying to leave and a user insisted on harassing him -- not when Wik was running an automated script (bot) to vandalize dozens of pages automatically.