Mar 26 2007
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Sky map!
When someone emails me asking to link to a site of theirs, I tend to ignore the email. Too much spam! But I’ll make an exception here, for sure.
Check out Sky-Map. It’s an interactive all-sky map, and it’s web-based. This is a piece of software that is sorely needed. There are lots of skymap websites out there, but few are really useful in the way I need… like finding out if Saturn is close to a bright star tonight, or if the Moon is near a planet. I have software on my PC I use (TheSky by Software Bisque if you’re curious; I use the old version 5 because I don’t like 6 as much, and it runs too slowly on my PC which is a bit long in the tooth), but I want something portable.
With Sky-Map, you can look at positions of objects, set your time and location and see what’s up now, and more. It’ll even show you the Sloan Digital Sky Survey image of an area of the sky, if available. My one major complaint: I’d like to see the constellation names displayed as a default, since sometimes the outlines aren’t all that familiar to me– and I’m fairly familiar with the sky and constellations. But that’s a quibble.
It’s a cool piece of coding, and you’ll have fun poking around. Enjoy.
Fun! I wish someone would build a server to serve all sorts of surveys (DSS, SDSS, 2MASS, etc.) with something like this or the Google Maps API. I’ve thought about doing it from time to time if I had a little more time.
How cool! That’s like a google maps for the sky! Very handy indeed (I prefer softwares though. No load time.)
Google should really do it.
Of course, God (er…) forbid they make it work for Safari.
I think there are still some bugs to ironed out. I asked it to find Saturn and it took me to a 12th magnitude deep-sky object in Aquarius.
Even better, download this free software. It really is fantastic:
http://www.stellarium.org/
[…] AstronomÃa 2.0Sky-map, una aplicación en lÃnea para observar las estrellas. VÃa Bad Astronomy Blog. […]
I use Starry night, but sky-map is going as a bookmark on my mobile devices that can’t run the bigger software!
Hoorah! Back to astronomy.
–
On-line sky globe…
This was pointed out over at Bad Astronomy. It is an interactive sky-globe, similar to what you would get with, say, Starry Night, but free and on-line. This is something that’s quite cool because Starry Night (which is what I…
One complaint. Very minor.
This sky map does not show solar system objects. This is not obvious unless you read the FAQ. Typing in Saturn in the search takes you to the Saturn Nebula.
Overall, a very cool piece of work!
Thad
While we’re talking about good astronomy, I’ll put in a plug for another website useful for backyard astronomers: http://cleardarksky.com. My friend Attilla takes forecast data from the Canadian Meteorological Centre and massages it to produce “sky clocks”. A sky clock, in Attilla’s words: “It’s an attempt to show at a glance when, in the next 48 hours, we might expect clear and dark skies for one of many observing sites”. 1900 observation sites currently listed, with more added as requested.
Speaking of Saturn…
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-034
Hah, Google will probably buy it, like they did Writely. Google Earth, meet Google Sky. That would be awesome.
Google probably won’t buy it. I’m sure they have something better in the works, as they’ve recently partnered with the LSST project.
This is a cool site, nice one. Another free download worth a play is http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ Even better, there is a version for Linux, Windows and Mac as well as source code as it is a OS/GNU project. It also has a neat add on donwload section as well as instructions for creating your own.
James: actually, I’m not surprised at the hexagon, and I’m not sure why the astronomers in the article are either. There are a lot of metastable spherical harmonics with hexagonal symmetry, and some with rather low angular momentum numbers. For a convection pattern to arise and be reinforced by that sort of harmonic shouldn’t be so surprising.
Of course, spherical harmonics are all because of a Lie group, back to this week’s math news.
Sky Map doesn’t work on a Macintosh ; this software lacks Intelligent Design !
[…] 29 03 2007 via the Bad Astronomer, Sky Map is like google maps but for the night […]
[…] Map. Just what you’d think. [via] Powered by Gregarious […]
Well, it’s kind of cute, but I am a big fan of XEphem: and travelling isn’t a problem, since I run it on all my machines, including my laptop and I can get datasets from miscellaneous catalogues and surveys and pipe them into my fv or ds9, so all is good…;)
Of course one needs Linux for that.
And, sky-map couldn’t find NGC869 for me; oh well…