Time Caller is a program which displays the time, sounds a pip and then speaks the second to which that pip relates.  It was written for the 8 June 2004 transit of Venus to attempt to accurately record the timing of the 4 contacts of the ingress and egress of Venus.

It is to be used in conjunction with a webcam which can use the PC's soundcard microphone input as its sound stream (ideally) rather than its own integrated microphone.  The software of the Philips ToUcam Pro can allow this.  Directly connecting the PC's soundcard speaker output socket to the soundcard microphone with a double ended cable with 3.5mm stereo plugs allows the sound output of Time Caller to be recorded with the webcam's video stream.

If the webcam software does not allow this then placing the PC's load speaker near the webcam's microphone should suffice.

Sychronising the PC's internal clock, identifying any time lag, recording the event and then playing back the webcam video stream later, using software such as Windows Movie Maker, objective estimations can be made of events such as the 4 contacts of the Venus transit.

Other uses could be for occultations.

Keith Rickard will be presenting this program and how to use it at the Society meeting on 13 May 2004.  Further notes are likely to be made here later.

In the meantime, to use this software carry out the following instructions:

• Click on the download link below and then click 'Open' on the 'File Download' dialog box.

• Unzip the  Time Caller.exe  into  C:\Time Caller

• Double click on the program file  Time Caller.exe  in the folder  C:\Time Caller  to run the program.

• Create a shortcut on your desktop to this program file if you wish.

Minimum PC requirements: CPU 133Mhz, soundcard, MS Windows 95,98,Me, NT, 2000, XP, 8MB of RAM, 3 MB of harddisk, VGA display.

Click here to Download Time Caller

Screenshot of Time Caller speaking the time: