Category Archives: Resources

Observation Planners 2025

Here are some observation planners for 2025

Each plot shows which day of the year the object culminates at around 1200hrs UTC, in Auckland.

Globular Clusters

Open Clusters

Messier Objects

Planetary Nebulae

Long Period Comets

Validation

The plot above for globular clusters shows the day that NGC5986 culminates at 1200hrs UTC in Auckland is a few days before new moon in May. Stellarium confirms this. Here is the output from Stellarium showing the altitude for NGC5986 around midnight on 25 May 2025 is approximately that shown in the plot above. Going 24hrs either side shows this is the maximum altitude for 1200hrs UTC over 2025.

Looking at

Plot.ly

I’ve become a fan of Plot.ly — an online service for plotting data and sharing it. I was mainly interested in figuring out how to plot my useage of the NeSI PAN cluster computer — particularly for seeing how many computer nodes I was using at any given time, and how many jobs were left to do. I found that with Plot.ly you can stream data to their server and it will update a plot as the new data come in. Their tutorials for setting this up are reasonably straightforward, and I managed to write a little python code to stream the state of my jobs on the cluster (with a little help of crontab and scp):

Link to live streaming plot.

Screenshot from this afternoon:

plotly