Introduction
This is a project I keep updated in my spare time, whenever conceded.
First thing to say, it's not all my own work: the initial project must be credited to Stuart Lowe who wrote the code when he was working at Las Cumbres Observatory. Stu's Virtualsky is a great software IMHO and all my gratitude and esteem goes to him for his piece of artwork.
I'm a passionate of astronomy since the teen age and now (2023) a software engineer in my late fifties. As I have more than 25 years of experience in web development I felt the need to improve Virtualsky, partly regarding a better and modern UX/UI and partly expanding data and features. To achieve the result I had to put aside Stu's aim to keep the code as lighter as possible and - about 4 years after putting my nose in - this is the current release.
It happened I've been working on the code for some hours and got to get back months later, so the code is far for being clean and ordered like the original one, but it... could... work! ;-)
Nicola Busetto
Venice (Italy), December 2023
info@bitstream.it
What's new
These are the improvements I made:
- an extended database of 41057 stars from Hipparcos catalogue (up to Mag.8)
- a responsive layout in order to be easily browsed from smartphones and tablets
- an interactive dropdown menu (on the left)
- an icons shortcut menu (on the right)
- a screen centered (red) square to be used as pointer (imo best solution for all kind of devices)
- a mini detail box for each object pointed, with links to image panels
- a detailed image panel for each star retrieved from the Aladin Sky Atlas public API
- all the alpha stars and most of the secondary stars names
- a detail panel for Sun, Moon and Solar System Planets surfaces retrieved from Aladin
- the whole Messier and NGC catalogues and relative detailed image also retrieved from Aladin
- Ceres and Pallas asteroids
- some of the major Comets who passed by recently
- a panel showing Jupiter's Galileian moons position (at time set in the planetarium), integrating an improvement of Sky and Telescope script
- the Moon phases (at time set in the planetarium), integrating an improvement of Salvatore Ruiu script
- a database search in order to find Stars and Constellations (by names), Sun, Moon, Planets, Messier's and NGC's objects position on the map
Something that has been lost in the remaking due to development needs:
- Internationalisation
Sorry... this has to be put back again, sooner or later!
Planetarium Rooms
The Planetarium has 3 "rooms" that can be accessed indipendently:
Technology
Everything has been made by using HTML / Javascript / CSS.
I took it as challenge to my habits and knowledge, because it lacks of a database in the backend like I'm used to work with.
Basically it's a pure frontend application as no code is executed server side.