The quickest decimal to DMS convertion in Excel

Coordinates DMS to decimal and decimal to DMS one cell only Excel

Suppose you work on geographical or astronomical projects requiring transformation between the decimal and degree-minute-second pattern. You probably want to have everything converted as quickly as possible. On the web, some tutorials explain that the most common solution is using the Data -> Text to Columns with the main ribbon. Another way presented in the … Read more

Happy New Year 2025 to everyone

Happy New Year 2025

You might have noticed the long inactivity if you read articles on my website regularly. The last serious article was about the lunar standstill and the entire website went quiet. What is the reason behind it? For over 8 years of running this blog/website I did my best to provide the original approach for various … Read more

Major lunar standstill and moonrise/moonset azimuth fluctuations

Polichna Udeuschle Moonset

The text explains the rare phenomenon, in which the azimuths of moonrise and moonset are more extreme. This situation allows us to see distant landscape features with the lunar disk beyond. Learn more about the lunar standstill and its frequency across the centuries. The changes in moonrise/moonset azimuths can give you a clue of how some Megalithic constructions have been set and how the Moon’s path across the sky would have looked like thousands of years before. Moreover, the declination of the Moon isn’t the same. It changes significantly because of the parallax.

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UK Address sanitizer in Excel 365

UK Address sanitizer tool

This article will shortly describe the tool I needed to develop recently. It is aimed at addressing cleansing. The general lists of addresses are often messy. It means, that the components of the address aren’t ordered well amidst various spaces and commas in the wrong places. It eventually excludes these addresses from proper geocoding and … Read more

Solar eclipse below the horizon – the observation guideline

Solar eclipse below the horizon observation pattern

The 2024 total solar eclipse is coming. Anyone interested will be in North America. We cannot forget about the people, who live or will temporarily stay in Western Europe on the day when the event occurs. Therefore I decided to prepare the text, which presents the guideline for this specific kind of observation. The guideline … Read more

Downloading OpenStreetMap vector datasets effectively

OpenStreetMap data download to QGIS

OpenStreetMap platform is a worldwide free geographic database, updated and maintained by free volunteers. The primary advantage of this platform is the availability of the data, which can be downloaded anytime by the user unlike Google Maps, which requires appropriate payments. In fact, there are a few options for getting the GIS vector data from … Read more

The correct way of using QGIS Viewshed plugin

QGIS Viewshed plugin

Visibility analysis constitutes great importance in many fields such as sensor deployment, decisions for placement of mobile towers for maximum coverage, military operation planning, gaming, fire monitoring towers in the forest, urban design, landscape planning, etc (Saxena, Mundra, Jigyasu, 2020) or even for location graves (Lockwood, Masters, 2021). The explanations of the current text are … Read more