When I first began recording my astronomical observations, everything was written on index cards. Each object had a card and everything I learned about that object, notes, observations, and other information was scrawled on the card. This simple system worked very well. However, as the number of objects I had observed grew, so did the stack of index cards. Soon, it became apparent that my index card system was no longer adequate.

The next evolution of my log began as individual 8.5 x 11 pages stored in notebooks, one notebook for each list of objects (Messier, Urban, etc.) I transferred the information on each index card to a page in the notebook. The notebooks allowed more notes and observations, and added the necessary room for sketches. Again, this system was simple and worked well in the beginning. Unfortunately, the effort required to maintain the notebooks became problematic. As the number of objects grew ever larger I began to repeat observations, start new pages for objects I already observed, and spend too much time simply trying to sort through the pages.

I finally decided to move the log to the computer, which surprisingly I did not do in the first place. I typed my notes into a Word document, added the scanned images of my sketches, and added all of the general information I had collected on observing techniques and reference material. I used this logbook for quite some time until I passed my 1000th observation. At this point, the logbook had grown to over 350 pages in length and simply printing an updated version became time consuming and costly. In addition, the requirements for my observing log were exceeding the capability of my printed logbook, especially for those objects where I had multiple observations. Simply trying to compare different observations of the same object meant flipping pages back and forth.

At this point, I decided that it was time to move my logbook into a database. This gave me the greatest amount of flexibility in both storage and retrieval of the information I had collected. Over time, I migrated all of my information to a MySQL database. All of the observing log information is now readily available in any manner I desire. Extracting information is as simple as executing a SQL query against the database and viewing the results.

The blog seen here arose from the need to have a more user-friendly interface to the database than the SQL query system I am using. It quickly became apparent there were certain functions that I performed repeatedly such as determining how many items I had observed in an observing list. I created some PHP scripts to automate these functions and return the data as HTML, which I could view on any computer with a web browser. Thus, this webblog was born; partly by necessity, and partly by accident.

This blog is a work in progress and will probably always be a work in progress.

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