The ShipWatcher Blog

Thursday, November 8, 2007

New Powerful Search Option

Shipwatcher now lets you search for ships that are close to either Sunrise, Sunset, Noon or Midnight.

It also lets you show the most popular, and least popular ships.

The info is based on the latest position report of the ship. Some ships don't give position reports very frequently, so they won't be included in the search.

This should make it easier for you to quickly pick bridgecams that contain interesting content.

It's also more fun!

Enjoy.

Neil

Technical info:
The search will exclude any position reports more than 4 days old.

If a ship is moving easterly or westerly, and its last report is 4 days old, the sunrise / sunset queries could have a margin of error of between 1 and 2 hours.

Usually this is only a problem for "Sunrise" queries where the ship is sailing west, or "Sunset" where the ship is sailing east, as in these situations, the ship will still be in darkness.

Allow a margin of error of almost 25 minutes per day based on the age of the location report. So if a report is two days old, the sunrise / sunset times will be out by almost an hour.

Ships travelling North / South won't experience such a large margin of error.

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