Tracking calls by lunar phase

[oneilltnc]

I know this may sound a little crazy, but I need to try and attempt to track call volume based on the lunar phases. Does anyone have any ideas on how I may be able to do this. Our data is stored in a SQL Server 2000 database and I am using CR 9.

 

[SmpTraining]

How do you define a lunar phase?

Steve Phillips, Crystal Consultant

 

[crystalreporting]

A little crazy?!? Alright, so you're trying to establish if werewolves place more calls during their 'busy' phase - you'd need to establish some form of calendar that outlined the lunar phases (full, half etc.), or build these into a formula. I'm not a lunazologist (I just made that up) but I don't think you could build a formula that would be good for any date? So you might have to allow for changing your database, or formula as the moon phases change. Maybe someone with more knowledge on how lunar phases relate to calendar days can answer this one...

Peter Shirley

http://www.linkcorp.com

 

[oneilltnc]

This is how a lunar cycle was defined for me... There are 8 phases of the moon in sequence of their occurrence starting from new moon. It takes 709 hours to get through this cycle, so essentially I believe it would be 88.625 hours between each phase.
1.New Moon
2.Waxing Crescent
3.First Quarter Moon
4.Waxing Gibbout Moon
5.Full Moon
6.Waning Gibbous Moon
7.Last Quarter Moon
8.Waning Crescent Moon
I want to start from January 2 at 8:23 pm (which was the first new moon of the year) and go through the current date.

 

[crystalreporting]

If you're wanting to group calls by the phase, and you know when the phases occur, add a group and customize it i.e. create a group for each of the phases (New Moon etc.) and then define which date range applied to each. Depending on your version of Crystal you do this by selecting specified order when creating a group, and naming your own groups with criteria to determine which records fall into which groups. Waxing Gibbout Moon - isn't that Frank Zappa's son?

Peter Shirley

http://www.linkcorp.com

 

[Madawc]

If you already know the value in hours, then you can compare any given date to a 'base date', i.e.

DateDiff ("h", BaseDate, YourDate)

You could also get a bit of astronomy software that will tell you the phase of the moon, which you do need if you're a serious star-gazer. (Mars looks a lot better with the moon below the horizon, as is currently the case from England.) There's probably free software that would tell you, and you could generate an Excel table and feed it into Crystal.

Madawc Williams
East Anglia, Great Britain