Or you want to move the map forward in time to see when you’ll be able to get a view of Saturn. But you’re often not concerned with the sky right now, but maybe in a few hours, when it’s dark and your telescope is set up. And that’s what you initially see when you go to the url. The goal of my sky chart is to provide a place where the backyard astronomer in our target area can go to get a relevant map of the current sky: the stars right now.
A page with a table that you can sort by dragging its entries around is getting interactive. A bunch of pages with hyperlinks is not quite interactive, because you’re not manipulating a thing, but rather jumping between different things. But if this word still means anything, I think it refers to something that you can manipulate, change, and put in different states. I feel I should also apologize somewhat for my use of the term “interactive.” This word has certainly become far too common! What’s not interactive on the web? Maybe a plain text file with no hyperlinks. In additional to all of this, there are transient objects such as asteroids and comets, which should also be charted, and the effects of light pollution, which should be taken into account to limit the amount of information on the map, so that it does not too unrealistically exceed what we can be expected to see from our semi-urban vantage point.
The chart is also dependent on where you are on the Earth. As the Earth turns, the apparent positions of all these objects changes from hour to hour they change as well, although more gradually, as the Earth revolves around the sun along with the other planets, and as the Moon revolves around the Earth. Perhaps I should mention that a sky map is a chart designed to help you figure out where to look to find stars, planets, constellations, and other inhabitants of the, usually, night sky. I’ve aimed this writeup at web designers and programmers who might be interested in the techniques I used to produce a sky map that’s responsive, fast-loading, and has a fair amount of interactivity, using purely HTML5 and css3 with no javascript. This article describes the first of these, an interactive sky map.
SKYCHART OUTLINE SERIES
I’ve embarked on a project to build a series of web applications for the Arlington Planetarium website that illustrate and teach concepts in astronomy and related sciences.
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