The Astronomy Nexus

A few changes to the interface:

A few changes to Endeavour recently:

First, I've rearranged the "Chart Labels" into a more compact arrangement. Related options (like those for chart-level settings, or star labels, or deep-sky object labels) are in the same columns. This should make it a little easier to keep track of option settings with similar functions.

Endeavour now has stellar motion markers, allowing you to see where the stars were far in the past, or will be far in the future. Here's an example, showing where the stars will be 10,000 years in the future:

The Endeavour application now has a large subset of the fourth US Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC4). The subset contains over 30 million stars to magnitude +15.0.

Here's an example of the difference. This is the M13 area using the Tycho-2 catalog:

And this is the M13 area with the UCAC-4 subset:

I've just completed a monster rewrite of the old Distant Worlds star charting application. It now has a bunch of new features:

Yes, I know this site has been pretty dead lately. Interstate moves can do that. Fortunately, that's been over for a while, giving me some time to make updates.

The Star Mapper has gotten a big -- and long overdue -- update. New features include:

• When you hover over a star to get its information, the information appears next to the star instead of in the upper right. The star itself gets highlighted as well.

I am hosting some of the larger downloads on this site on GitHub now. The most current version of the HYG database will always be posted there. Any publicly available code relevant to the site will go there as well.

It was clear for just long enough here in Colorado to get a good view of the eclipse. I got a number of decent shots with just a compact camera (Panasonic Lumix FZ-28, most at the max zoom level of 18x). As I've told a friend once, since the albedo of the Moon is similar to that of fresh asphalt, getting the right exposure settings for the full Moon is about as hard as getting them for a sunlit street. With an eclipse going on, it's a little tougher, but aggressive exposure bracketing solves many ills, and is very simple with almost any digital camera.

Here's one of my favorite shots (click to embiggen):

More images below the break:

The Distant Worlds Star Mapper has gotten a rewrite. There isn't a whole lot visible on the outside, but charts should get created a bit faster, especially if you have a lot of extra details (like constellation lines) turned on.

Science News has published one of my images from this site. The October 23 issue has an article about Gliese 581, discussing the potentially Earthlike planet discovered recently in its habitable zone. The image is a slight modification of the large chart in this post, showing the Sun among other stars as seen from Gliese 581.