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.
March 26th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
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.
March 26th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
How cool! That’s like a google maps for the sky! Very handy indeed (I prefer softwares though. No load time.)
March 26th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Google should really do it.
March 26th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Of course, God (er…) forbid they make it work for Safari.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:06 am
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.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Even better, download this free software. It really is fantastic:
http://www.stellarium.org/
March 27th, 2007 at 1:41 am
[...] AstronomÃa 2.0Sky-map, una aplicación en lÃnea para observar las estrellas. VÃa Bad Astronomy Blog. [...]
March 27th, 2007 at 2:57 am
I use Starry night, but sky-map is going as a bookmark on my mobile devices that can’t run the bigger software!
March 27th, 2007 at 3:35 am
Hoorah! Back to astronomy.
–
March 27th, 2007 at 5:04 am
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…
March 27th, 2007 at 6:22 am
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
March 27th, 2007 at 7:00 am
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.
March 27th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Speaking of Saturn…
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-034
March 27th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Hah, Google will probably buy it, like they did Writely. Google Earth, meet Google Sky. That would be awesome.
March 27th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
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.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
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.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
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.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Sky Map doesn’t work on a Macintosh ; this software lacks Intelligent Design !
March 29th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
[...] 29 03 2007 via the Bad Astronomer, Sky Map is like google maps but for the night [...]
March 30th, 2007 at 2:06 am
[...] Map. Just what you’d think. [via] Powered by Gregarious [...]
March 31st, 2007 at 10:41 pm
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…