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Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Constellations

I've created an article for Monoceros according to the template here. Any suggestions on how to improve the template? I must have missed quite a lot of things. --Lorenzarius 14:04 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

Useful links --Lorenzarius

I've created a program for drawing celestial maps of high quality. Originally it was made for h2g2 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide) but it's free software, so it may be useful for this project. It's called PP3 (http://pp3.sourceforge.net). I added such a map to Leo. --Torsten Bronger 00:40 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Excellent map! It is so clear and detailed. If you have the time, please upload the maps for the other constellations. --Lorenzarius 07:55 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Thank you. Do you think the colours/font size/whatever are okay? At the moment I still can change everything. I (think I) optimised it for Wikipedia, but e.g. on a dark background, I could include the real colours of the stars. See an alternative map (http://pp3.sourceforge.net/h2g2/leo.gif) for an example. Which constellations should have highest priority? --Torsten Bronger 01:32 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

I've prepared the following charts: Big Bear, Orion, Lion, Berenice's Hair, Monoceros, Cetus,

Taurus, and Ara.

Tell me if other entry are finished or in preparation and need a map. And tell me if I have to modify something in the maps. --Torsten Bronger 13:29 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

Well done, the maps fit very well into the articles. But IMO it is better to use the official names of the constellations instead of their English names. Since the IAU names are what people usually used.

With the white background the black stars are shown very clearly. However, showing the real colours of the stars will make the maps more informative, but I wonder if doing so will make the stars less clear.

The map of Ursa Major shows only the big dipper, can you change so that the whole constellation is displayed? Also if the maps are too wide then they can't be placed next to the table (just like the map of Cetus), I think a width around 440 will be good. --Lorenzarius 11:32 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

I've updated Ursa Major, now with bigger area and latin names. Cetus will follow, probably yet today. Unfortunately we now haven't the same scale for all images anymore. But this wouldn't be possible anyway. -- Torsten Bronger 15:50 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Originally posted on my Talk page by Alan Peakall

Great work on the constellations! However, as Ursa Major appears in my browser, the sky map is overwriting the left hand side of the attribute table when there is insufficient width. I think the table should overwrite sky map under this condition. Is this known? easy to fix? -- Alan Peakall 15:27 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

I think this happens when the viewer is using a lower screen resolution like 800x600 (I'm using 1024x768 so it doesn't happen to be). The only method I can think of is to move the map to the bottom of the page so the map and the table is not displayed side by side. Are there any other better methods? (This is not a big problem actually, but I feel that it looks better to display the map on the top of the page and just next to the table.) --Lorenzarius 10:27 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

New maps: Cygnus, Aries, Gemini, and Cancer. I've scaled down Cetus, and replaced all constellation names with their Latin translations in all bitmaps. -- Torsten Bronger 11:49 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

Pipe dream: It would be a lot of fun to find digitized images of a cool old star map with images of the constellation's figures (you know the kind I'm thinking of)... - Montréalais

Hey that's what I am thinking of! Since most of the figures of the constellations are so hard to imagine (I always think that Saggittarius look like a teapot more than a centaur), adding such images would greatly enhance the articles. --Lorenzarius 10:16 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

I could do that, I have the complete celestial atlas of Hevelius here (17th century). However the graphics would have mirrored labels: The original maps are mirrored themselves, for the telescope view. If I wanted to undo that, the labels would become inverted. Catch-22 ... --Torsten Bronger 10:47 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

That's not a big problem, since I think the main purpose of these artistic maps is to show the readers what the mythological figures look like. We can add descriptions to the images to explain the reason for the mirrored maps. --Lorenzarius 11:28 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

So, make them *readable* or according to the view of the unaided eye? --Torsten Bronger 12:44 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

"Readable" maps will do. --Lorenzarius 13:47 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

I think I'll focus on normal maps for now. Hevelius' charts are bigger than my scanner, and a scaling-down copy is very difficult. But I uploaded Leo and Cygnus. Please tell me whether colour/brightness/contrast/gamma is okay.

I'm just wondering why you're claiming copyright on Hevelius' drawings. (Maybe you just automatically add the copyright notice for every upload?)

I don't know how it is in other countries, but in Germany any copyright expires 70 years after one's death. I assume that this is not typical of Germany. The copyright I add is not for the map, but for the bitmap (the JPEG file). -- Torsten Bronger 04:30 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Of course I'm not familiar with the copyright laws of Germany or even the EU, but (basing on how I perceive American copyright) the only things that are copyrightable are creative works/derivatives. Those drawings were the copyrighted works of Hevelius and since he's long dead, I assume that the drawings are in the public domain, right? Anyway, just scanning those drawings does not make the image files your copyright since you did not add anything substantially creative. (If the drawing was part of a photomontage or collage, then you can have copyright.) That is the reason why you just cannot scan any picture from any recent magazine or book since that would be a copyright infringement (unless your use was fair use).

So I'm quite sure I can copy your uploaded drawings and use it for myself since they're essentially public domain. Of course, don't take my word for it since I'm not an attorney. :) —seav

If I make a photography of a painting of Michelangelo, I can hold copyright on the photography. I had to choose the right part of the drawing, had to adjust contrast, saturation, and brightness, I chose a nice background colour. So I think you can compare it with a photography.

The only problem that indeed exists is that I haven't used Hevelius' original maps for the scanning but facsimile prints. I don't know whether these prints are copyrighted because it's in Polish. However I consider it a very small issue. Since you find those maps in probably hundreds of books all over the world, I'm sure that nobody can bring Wikipedia into trouble because of my bitmaps. -- Torsten Bronger 16:23 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but if you submit something to Wikipedia, it's no longer under your copyright, but under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may wish to remove the copyright notices. - Montréalais

I think only text material has to be released under the GFDL. Other media (sound and image files) can still have their original licenses intact but it is preferred that they be in public domain or licensed under the GFDL. (See Wikipedia:Copyrights.) —seav

I only have to give it under the GFDL, and according to Wikipedia's image policy, I should say what the current copyright status is on the description page.

I believe when you submit copyrighted material of yours to Wikipedia, you retain the copyright to your materials. But you can never retract from the GFDL lisence. --Lorenzarius 10:35 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

I think that I as the copyright holder can re-licence my material at any time. If this makes it incompatible with the GFDL I have to assure that it is deleted from Wikipedia, because I declared that it is GFDL material when I uploaded it. I've seen such re-licencing in free software development. Of course I don't even think about changing the licence. Be that as it may, I believe that everything is alright as it is now. -- Torsten Bronger 12:03 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure of the ins and outs. As long as you don't turn around someday and say Hey! you can't use that anymore ;)

Also, the drawings look excellent; thank you. - Montréalais

Please make sure that the star maps are 300 pixels in width and placed in the table. Otherwise the table, text and image will all fight with each other on the screens of people with lower resolution screen settings. See Wikipedia:Image use policy for more. --mav

You set the table width to 330px. What does this imply for the different browser types? Are smaller images streched? Wider ones are obviously scaled down, which is a very nice thing. To be honest, I feel tempted to continue as before (400px max), and if a user needs a bigger version they may click on the map. -- Torsten Bronger 15:53 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

Providing larger version is definitely a common practice around here. But simply setting a table width does not force an image to display at that size (for some reason this doesn't work on Wikipedia - however, even if it did it still wouldn't be a good idea because the result is often an ugly image). Also, the difference in width isn't that great so going through the extra effort of setting up different versions and providing media links probably wouldn't be worth it. What I did in this case was place the images in the tables, download them, set them to RGB, indexed them, resized them to a 300 px width and then uploaded them. --mav

I really have no problem with being a mere raw material provider, but I'd like to know when my images are overwritten because I have to adjust the description (namely the scale). Moreover, there still is the possibility of re-calculating them (i.e. the labels keep their size) which may be the superior alternative. On the other hand, why are 400px a problem with this stacked form? -- Torsten Bronger

I think it would better to have a small version (to be displayed in the article) and a large version (to let readers see a detailed map if they want) of the star maps for each of the constellations. --Lorenzarius 09:32 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)

First, I'm sorry about the description problem - I didn't know about the scale problem. Aligned 400px wide images/tables overwhelm the text for people using 800 x 600 screen resolutions (with the side bar there is just a little over 600px for article content and images or tables that cover more than half that available area overwhelm the article). Larger fonts would be great though. --mav

Okay then I propose the following: I continue as before, with 400px as maximum (as I already pointed out, only a few further constellations will be that big anyway) and for all images bigger than say 300px a smaller variant is created with a different filename as a thumbnail in the entry (with a link to the bigger one of course).

This would mean that I restore the overwritten bitmaps. I'd be nice if someone can do the downscaling/inclusion work because I have to pay for every online minute and -- while uploading is efficient -- this clicking around is time consuming and thus superfluously expensive. I could do it, but if someone has a better connection ... thank you! -- Torsten Bronger 12:54 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)

Sure - but if you could do the first one youself I could just emulate that. --mav

Okay, here is my proposal:

All graphics that are bigger than 300px (so far, all except Ara, but as I said, the small constallations are yet to come) are downscaled to 70% (NOT to a fixed width). Since no graphics is wider than 427px (a value that I had chosen after a posting of Lorenzarius from Feb 16) this means that no thumbnail will be wider than 300px.

Please scale down carefully, i.e. convert to RGB before you do it etc., you know what I mean. Call the graphics <oldname>_small.png. Upload it, and link on its description page to the original image (say that it is a thumbnail) and put your name on it.

But before I will do that for Leo as a template I have some questions:

Is is common practice on Wikipedia to call a thumbnail *_small.png?
How should one mark an image as a thumbnail, i.e., how is the reader told that a bigger version exists?
As an alternative we could scale every image down to 70%. The advantage would be that somebody could replace the larger versions of all constellations without disturbing the article. Nevertheless I don't like that idea.

-- Torsten Bronger 07:44 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

This sounds good. I've read somewhere that scaling to an even percentage as you suggest reduces artifacts (indexing and setting to RGB also helps a lot). also..

Some people add "small", others "thumbnail", yet others simply "thumb". All work. Your suggestion of _small is good for a standard here.
See Pluto (planet), sheep and Great-horned owl[?] for some examples.
Probably not needed.

--mav

Two other questions: I love interlaced bitmaps, but PNGs become up to 20% bigger with interlacing. What do you think? BTW, JPEGs can be significantly smaller than PNGs without changing the image too much (especially because most of it is white) but I hope you agree with me that we shouldn't provide them as JPEGs on principle (I talk only about the thumbnails here anyway).

In theory downscalling to 300px and interlacing should cancel each other out as far as file sizes are concerned but for these images it in fact nearly doubles the file size. It would therefore probably be better to make these images at 300 px to begin with. But then again the file sizes aren't that huge so this isn't that big of a deal. PNG is the best format for these types of images (jpgs would have fuzzy text). --mav

Secondly, I used the trick of the Sheep article for the link to the larger version. Is this "Media:" (instead of "Image:") thing exploiting an undocumented feature of Wikipedia or is it secure? I seems to link to an internal place of Wikipedia, making it impossible to see e.g. the description. May it be better to link to it with "Image:"? (But then, of course, the reader had to find the link to the actual graphics by themselves.)

"Media" is a secure feature. It is also under-documented. Providing a link to the image page just provides an unneeded extra step to get to the larger image. The same info will be on the thumbnail's description page. --mav

Thirdly I have updated Leo according to the new (virtual) template. Please review it. Was Leo the only map that you, Mav, rescaled to 300px? -- Torsten Bronger

Leo looks great! But having the media link to the larger version may be more work than what it is worth - we are only talking about a difference in size of 100 px. I converted several other constellations as well. --mav

I think it's worth it. After all we have now a final structure and we can upload both smaller thumbnails and larger detail views if we wish, without touching the template again. -- Torsten Bronger

I have scanned Hevelius drawings of the following constellations in fairly good quality:

  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      149533 Apr  4 21:43 and.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      153148 Apr  4 21:43 argo.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      152570 Apr  4 21:43 boo.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      138340 Apr  4 21:43 cet.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      144866 Apr  4 21:43 cyg.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      142220 Apr  4 21:43 gem.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      165234 Apr  4 21:43 her.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      163780 Apr  4 21:43 leo.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      140277 Apr  4 21:43 ori.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      137514 Apr  4 21:43 pav_ara_tra.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      163717 Apr  4 21:43 per.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      136439 Apr  4 21:43 sco.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      136292 Apr  4 21:43 sgr.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      159331 Apr  4 21:43 tau.jpg
  -rw-r--r--    1 bronger  users      123442 Apr  4 21:43 uma.jpg

You can download them from http://pp3.sourceforge.net/wiki/<filename>;.

I've experimented a little bit and -- although I am very experienced in image processing -- I was unable to get satisfying results, mostly because I'm not sure what is actually wanted:

Is it a good idea to include the whole rectangle, or is it enough to truncate it to the actual figure?
What is the best image width? 400px are recommended, but this is only sensible if we don't use the whole rectangle in my opinion.
Should we use true greyscale JPEGs or should we colour the background to make it look nicer (increase in file size by factor 2 at least). PNGs are not very sensible I think. (However I haven't tried it so far.)
Should we try to show the reader the connection of the asterisms and the constellation drawings? This questions has two sub-questions:
- Should we mirror the drawings to have the real view (in contrast to Hevelius' eyepiece view)?
- Should we copy the main constellation lines in some way into the drawing to show the reader the equivalence?

Feel free to use the scans and upload modified versions to Wikipedia. -- Torsten Bronger

I uploaded a map for Cassiopeia, but didn't include it. (Whoever creates the thumbnails will have to do that.) -- Torsten Bronger 13:00 Apr 12, 2003 (UTC)

OK thanks, but what is the difference between "Image:Cassiopeia_constellation_map.png" & "Image:Cassiopeia_constellation_drawing.png"? -- looxix 13:05 Apr 12, 2003 (UTC)

No difference so far. I just named the file wrongly. The _drawing suffix is used for artistic drawings that show the constellation. But an ordinary user like me cannot undo wrong uploads. -- Torsten Bronger

Well, actually the Leo template calls smaller versions _small, not _thumb (see above). And I really want the downscaling to be done like this: Promote to 24bit colour depth (RGB) --> downscale to 0.7 --> index to 256 colours without dithering --> save as PNG. At least the first step is missing in your thumbnails. Some labels are unreadable now.

Humm, I see, for example the label 'Antares' in Scorpius in screwed.

I tried to first promote to 24-bit, it doesn't change anything! what I propose is , for the moment, to leave these thumbnails as they are, after all they are just thumbnails; those interested in more detailed information will probably try the full image anyway.

BTW I restored the old Sagittarius map. (This process of deleting and restoring of old image versions is very stange in Wikipedia I think.) -- Torsten Bronger

The CMa map is wider than 300px and thus a candidate for a thumbnail, too.

Hi, I whish to know what was the motivation to include the image/thumbnail into the table? Because, the more I convert some constellation to the new template, the more I find the result awfull. I find, for example, Cygnus well better looking than Leo. -- looxix 19:12 Apr 13, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I do agree that Cygnus looks better than Leo, but only for users with higher screen resolution. Please refer to the discussions above. -Lorenzarius 12:15 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

Please add to the 'not so completed' section the things that are yet to be done. (For example in parentheses.) Would help me a lot, because at the moment I can't always understand why a constellation is in this section. -- -Torsten Bronger 10:39 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

Should be clearer now. -- looxix 19:53 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

New maps: Corvus, Perseus, Auriga, Canes Venatici, Ursa Minor, Vulpecula, and Aquila. BTW, what happened to the Capricornus map? -- Torsten Bronger 18:39 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

Done, including the restoration of Capricornus map. Thanks. -- Looxix 19:19 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

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