Beautiful Soup

Beautiful soup is indeed beautiful!

I wanted to parse an HTML page containing a table and import it into a MySQL table in an automated way. Upon my friend Kumar’s advice, I came to know about Beautiful Soup. Today was the day to explore Beautiful Soup. Being new to python, I had to do a bit of python reading side-by-side. Finally, I was able to successfully pass an HTML file to my script and get a CSV output.

f = open("input_file.html","r")
g = open("outfile_file.csv,"w")
soup = BeautifulSoup(f)
t = soup.findAll('table')
for table in t:
    rows = table.findAll('tr')
    for tr in rows:
        cols = tr.findAll('td')
        for td in cols:
            g.write(td.find(text=True))
            g.write(",")
        g.write("\n")

This script parses a simple HTML table without looking for any special tags or anything. Now that this is working, I have to make this more stronger and parse an uglier table, my task for tomorrow.

 

Photo Session

Recently, some of us went around on a photographing spree. The subjects weren’t natural wonders or astronomical objects. They were professors. Yes. I tried my hand at taking professional portrait shots of professors for putting up on the department website. The idea was inspired by the photo on this webpage.

This was one of the shots that I took.

After a bit of GIMPing (mostly along the lines of this), I managed to get the photo to look like this.

I was impressed with the result. So, I decided to take one of mine also. That resulted in this.

 

Energy Conservation Night at Ganga

Ganga Hostel, IIT Madras helps in conserving energy

 

Midnight Beauty

What do you do after an evening full of mugging for AM110 ? You obviously get bored, duh. And I was no different. Took my camera and tripod headed to our terrace at midnight. Unlike normal photo sessions, I had a plan this time. I wanted to capture a nice, bright, long aeroplane trail. But as usual, I was distracted by other beautiful things waiting to be captured on film.

One of them was a huge patch of yellow light emanating from a construction site and its exotic reflection on a cloud over it. I was ready. I set up the shot and waited for the exposure to get over. Luckily, a plane happened to pass through my field.

Wow! I was amazed by the shot. That was, by far, the best night shot that I have ever taken.

Field Details:-

Sirius is seen in the top left. To the right, is an aeroplane that just took off. The yellow light is from a construction site.

Exposure Details :-

Canon PowerShot A540

f/2.6, Focal length, 5.6mm

ISO 200

15 second exposure

 

Tea Break

Prof. David Koilpillai

provides refreshments in between his two hour lectures. Period.

 

View from Inside

How many of you have been lucky enough to catch this view?

Wish you never get to do this? Well, this is fun after all. Once inside this vehicle, one feels as though he’s of great importance. Perks include salutes from personnel on the road.

How did I get to board this vehicle? No, I’m not a criminal. Just that I’m part of the Music Club, IIT Madras. And occasionally, I get to go and pick up the artistes for their concerts. And what IITM sends them is this.

As I said earlier, it’s fun to travel in this contraption. It is also fun to see the artistes’ reactions. they shouldn’t be expecting this, right?

 

Yelagiri Skies

I had gone to Yelagiri this weekend with some of my friends at IIT Madras along with Dr. Suresh Mohan. We were joined by the guys from Bangalore Astronomical Society at Yelagiri. What skies! People living in Chennai MUST visit a place like that to get a feel of what we are missing! Simply stunning.

I initially started off into a Messier Marathon. I managed to get a glimpse of at least 30 Messier Objects, 20 out of which I found myself. But a few hours into the night, I gave up the marathon and shifted to photography. I don’t own any high-end Astrophotography hardware. Nevertheless, it’s great fun to capture the night sky in my Canon Powershot A540. Below is Orion, the Hunter though my camera. Easily the best photo that I’ve taken till now.

Details: Canon Powershot A540, f2.6, ISO 800, 10 exposures of 15 seconds each. Aligned and stacked using Registax4 running on Wine

 

Besides, I got to meet many amateuro-professional astronomers and astrophotographers. The highlight of the night was Mr. Hemant’s photos of Eta Carinae and the never disappointing Omega Centauri.

Night was great fun, but we ended doing college assignment work in our resort in Yelagiri during the daytime A weekend that I’ll never forget.

Some shots of the equipment:

Hemant’s Meade 80ED APO, Arun’s Maede 10 inch

Hemant’s 12 inch telescope, Dr Suresh’s Orion 80ED, 80 mm Guidescope

 

Night Skies ..

Can you guess the time of the day when the above photo was taken? (Click on the photo for a bigger version). Would you believe it if I said 2 AM? Oh yes, 2 AM it is! Maybe the stars in the photo can convince you

We, Astronomy Club, IIT Madras held a session yesterday night at the Sangam Grounds. I tried out some shots of the sky using a Canon Powershot A540 with its shutter open for 15 seconds. And in the wee hours of the night I get photos like the one above! Clearly, this was my first time in taking such long exposures!

I managed to capture Ursa Major (which came out very well). That’s the one below

I also captured some afocal shots of the moon.

My (alomst) first shot at Astrophotography!

Aside: my Hackergotchi Tutorial is first on google! <Search>

 

Scary?

We share our hostel with the man below.

And him too??

 

Guess Where?

Any idea where this photo was taken ?

Update: Photo taken at the IIT Madras Oxidation Ponds, not a beautiful lake