SUNBEAR III
News & Reviews
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Case example of SUNBEAR
II
... from an E-mail to a colleague
mikreade@nbnet.nb.ca
... by Mike W. Reade
Adjunct Instructor for the Institute of Police Technology and Management
For its price, SUNBEAR II is a steal! Not only does the new version provide you with a comprehensive printout of the
sun's position, it will also provide you with information with respect to the Moon's position AND the Percent Lunar
Illumination! You have to give this a good look!
I've been using this program for a few years now and find it to be reliable and accurate. Why? One particular case I worked
four months ago, involved an elderly man who was crossing the road from south to north. A young girl was travelling east to
west. I was called to the scene one month AFTER the collision.
The magnetic road alignment was 276 Degrees. We obtained the latitude and longitude from topo maps and since this
occurred in a city, the time of the event was nailed down to two or three minutes. The collision reconstructionist, who was
on site within minutes, knew that the sun's position would be a factor.
He was smart enough to measure from the impact area east to the shadow line created by a line of trees. On site,
(laptop) we ran the SUNBEAR II program which told us the sun would be positioned along a magnetic bearing of 277
Degrees. Right in line with the westbound driver. Further, with the sun's vertical angle, we were able to place the
sun just at the top of the trees!
Well, we took a measurement of the height of the trees, and by way of a computerized diagram, we were able to show onscreen that
the reconstructionist measured an accurate shadow line! The member's measurement and SUNBEAR II's
information show the two were within a few feet of each other! Is it reliable? It sure is heck
is!
Best of all, the program comes with a comprehensive booklet that defines all of those terms that you always wanted to know but
were afraid to ask. I strongly support this and would recommend it for use by all collision investigators! I
hope this helps you with your decision to purchase SUNBEAR II.
Regards
SUNBEAR I - review for Law and Order magazine
...by Joeseph E. Badger
jebadger@juno.com
Group..
Always something new under the sun. Some of you may get your sunrise, sunset, and sun position information from sites on the
Internet. Many of your probably use the SunTime Plus software form Zephyr Services. And there are others.
They all work pretty good and their results compare favorably with the sunrise/set times published in our local paper, but some
of the software doesn't generate a report other than to allow you to print out plain vanilla lists of times, azimuths, etc. That may
be ample for your needs but I want to pass along information about a new program that does even more -- SUNBEAR [For the sun's
bearing, get it?].
SUNBEAR release 2.31 runs under DOS, WINDOWS 3.x and the dreaded Windows 95. It comes on a single 3.5" floppy and the
install feature expands the files and copies them to your hard drive. At A: Install<enter> you get the usual license
agreement where you forfeit your first born and you get all the usual Install Questions except for the one asking for your mother's
maiden name. Remember the 286's that came with an entire MB o'memory and ran at the breathtaking speed of 6-8 MHz? Mine is in the
back room disguised as a door stop but some folks still use 'em. Not to worry. SUNBEAR will run on the dinosaur too.
There are only six files on the floppy but when you install the software they'll unzip and expand to 17 files that consume a bit
less then 3.5 MB. Where some programs accept only degrees and minutes, SUNBEAR narrows it down to factions of seconds. You can
even calculate the difference between the time the sun rises where you live and when it comes up for you buddy across town. That's in
case you're having a duel at dawn and you don't want to be even a minute late.
Whether your monitor is CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA; whether you have a dot-matrix, ink jet or laser printer, SUNBEAR will work.
SUNBEAR gives you the position of the sun in the sky for any location on Earth and for any time of day, on any date...Well, the
results are accurate as long as the date is from 1800 to 2200 AD. No, you can't enter some date a couple of millennia ago to see
where the sun was the day Christ was born. SUNBEAR calculates the sun's position from magnetic north (in addition to true north) and
even takes into account that magnetic north doesn't stay put.
If you know the latitude/longitude of the location in question, you can enter that and get the precise data for the sun's position
at any time during the day. If you don't know the coordinates but you know the Zip Code, enter that. The information you get will be
the sun's position for the approximate geographical center of that Zip Code. And trust me, that'll be close enough for our
purposes.
Say you don't know the latitude or longitude, nor the Zip Code. Okay, "you don't know the latitude or longitude, nor the Zip Code."
I trust you at least know the STATE and some city or town in the vicinity. Good, SUNBEAR will let you enter it that way. Where some
software gives you only one azimuth, this one gives the "Bearing (True North to Sun)," "Bearing (Mag-North to Sun)" and "Angle
(Vertical to Sun)". Once you install the program, it'll automatically account for whether the location in question has
daylight saving time or not. Some Arizonians and Hoosiers may have to adjust. There are 29,000 five-digit Zip Codes in the database
and that's not every one of them. For instance, Bloomington, Indiana, has a whole slew of 'em; even Indiana University has its
own.
The I.U. Zip Code isn't in SUNBEAR's database but the ones next to it are. If the Zip Code you're looking for isn't in the
database, it'll tell you. And if you find a ZipCode not in the database, you may add it, as a new record, to the database.
Whenever you manually enter a longitude and latitude, the program will ask for a City name, State, and Zip and then as you if you
want to add this record to the database.
Canada's postal codes are not 5 numeric digits so Canadian locations are not listed with an associate Zip Code. But we still
know where you live.
When you install the software it'll ask you for your name (if your don't enter a name you can't continue). Then you can enter a
business or agency name (or nothing). I entered my address. When the report is generated, your name and the company's name appear
prominently.
You can even get an "Interval Report" that let you find out the sun's position every minutes, every five or fifteen minutes, or
every five or fifteen hours or any sort of interval. If you request too many intervals the data will scroll pretty fast from screen to
screen, but you can stop the scrolling by hitting the space bar. The current version won't let you hit the UpArrow or PageUp key to
peek at what you missed. But you can save it to a text file or send it to the printer.
There's a TUTILITY.DOC and a TUTILITY.HLP file which you can read but you may never need it. Among the text I found some
illusive stuff and here's what I found out from George Alexander, one of SUNBEAR's developers: "TUTILITY is a utility program freely
distributed by Borland as a diagnostic and repair utility for Paradox databases. Since I choose to use the Paradox database
search engine because of its blinding speed, I thought it inappropriate if I did not send along some "tool" that would help
SUNBEAR users repair a damaged ZipCode database. I did not think that many SUNBEAR users would be user of Borland's relational
database program - Paradox. TUTILITY has an executable(.exe), an on-line help file (.hlp), a users manual (.doc), and a
configuration file (.cfg). The help file is designed to be accessed from the executable. It is not meant to be a "human readable" text
file. That is why you see the unprintable characters if you view the file on your monitor. ...Lastly, this utility program has
nothing to do directly with SUNBEAR. If you ZipCode database never develops a consistency error, you'll never need to use the
utility." For any location outside the United States, you can't use the ZipCode database anyway. However, for our Canadian and overseas
readers, just enter the latitude and longitude, as well as the time zone of wherever you are, and voila! Or eureka!
The first 17 pages of the manual are all you really need and if you're like most people you will ignore the manual and simply load
and start the program. No problem. If you can read and follow on-screen directions you should do okay. But you'll want to read
the second 17 pages. All kinds of neat stuff. Stuff about the Earth's Geomagnetic Field and Magnetic Declination and the Magnetic
Equator. Put it this way. I loaded the software without any help from Windows and successfully ran the program. And if I can do it
all by myself and without a manual, you surely can too.
You've perhaps seen references to Civil, Nautical and Astronomical Twilight. Know the difference? SUNBEAR's manual
explains all three in detail. It also discusses Daylight Saving Time (even thought both the manual and software call it Daylight
Savings Time and that's technically incorrect, but remember, nit-picking is my job).
SUNBEAR uses the exact and precise longitude and latitude, entered by the user for the event of interest, to calculate the
Sunrise and Sunset at the precise location. Most local newspaper use some average geographic location for the city limitsand report
an average Sunrise and sunset for the city as a whole. You might try to compare your newspaper's results with SUNBEAR by using a
span of local Zip Codes.
George Alexander and Ron Rohde can provide you with information about SUNBEAR or send you an order form. The program retail for
$39.95 (note from G. Alexander - new data for the Moon has altered the price slightly to $49.95) "plus
a tiny shipping charge." (California residents must add 8.0% sales tax.)
I don't know what the cost and/or shipping charges are for overseas delivery so you guys in Australia, Germany and other
locations outside the North American continent are just going to have to inquire. By e-mail: vondaa@pacbell.net
(note from G. Alexander - e-mail has changed to : sunbear@pacbell.net
).
I'm told the developer has been asked whether this program outputs moon positions and phases. No, that's why they call it
SUNBEAR. Perhaps they better start working on MOONBEAM right away!
Or you can call (650) 364-3286 or fax (650) 364-3048 or write to Sunbear Associates, 98 Central Avenue, Redwood City, CA 94061-3823.
If you have any comments or question about the software, please don't send them to me. Please send them to SUNBEAR at sunbear@pacbell.net .
Joe
