It’s that time of the year

Donate to Wikipedia

Donate to Wikipedia

Yes, it’s that time of the year when you can show your appreciation to the Wikipedia. Many of us using Wikipedia on daily basis as source of information on almost any subject in the World. WikiSky’s team is active contributor of Astronomy section in Wikipedia. Many astronomical object articles in Wikipedia are illustrated with images produced by WikiSky. So, if you like Wikipedia, if you find it as useful tool for your researches or simple curiosities, if you are in favour of collaborative knowledge base on Internet, please consider to make some donation to keep Wikipedia’s servers up and running.

Sky-Map.org (WikiSky) on BBC

Sky-Map.org (WikiSky) was featured on BBC’s Webscape TV programme over last weekends. Thousands of new visitors, mostly from England, put quite a load on our servers.

Hubble’s New View of Star Birth in M83, the Southern Pinwheel


The spectacular new camera installed on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby spiral galaxy M83.

Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus. The sharp “eye” of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants.

The image, taken in August 2009, provides a close-up view of the myriad stars near the galaxy’s core, the bright whitish region at far right.

WFC3’s broad wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, reveals stars at different stages of evolution, allowing astronomers to dissect the galaxy’s star-formation history.

M83, located in the Southern Hemisphere, is often compared to M51, dubbed the Whirlpool galaxy, in the Northern Hemisphere. Located 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra, M83 is two times closer to Earth than M51.

Source: Hubble Site

Update

Last night we put new build on all our online servers. It includes mostly bug fixes and performance optimizations. There was significant change in JavaScript packaging. We tested all the changes, but our QA team abilities are quite limited. So please let us know if you find any bugs. Thanks.

Version 2 Window API

I mentioned already about SkyWindow API. Here’s a newer version.
SkyWindow2 API:


Below is the html code that does the trick:


<script type='text/javascript'
   src='http://wikisky.org/js/skywindow2'></script>
<div style='position:relative;left:0px;top:0px;width:450px;height:450px'>
<DIV id='mySkyWnd'
  style='position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:450px;height:450px;overflow:hidden;border:1px solid gray'
  onmouseout='hideddrivetip();'></DIV></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var options = {ra:12.4283, de:12.81, initZoom:6, zoom:6,
  survey:"", imgSource:"DSS2", allowTopPanel:true, showTopPanel:true, showRightPanel:false,
  allowMove:true, allowZoom:true,
  showPanZoomControl:true, panZoomControlLeft:6, panZoomControlTop:10,
  showScale:true, showStatus:false, showPosition:true, showStickers:true, showLabels:true,
  jpegQuality:0.8,
  showGrid:true, showOverlayGrid:false,
  showConstLines:true, showOverlayConstLines:false,
  showConstBoundaries:true, showOverlayConstBoundaries:false,
  showConstNames:false, showOverlayConstNames:false,
  showGalaxies:true, showOverlayGalaxies:false,
  showStars:true, showOverlayStars:false,
  buffer:1, moveTime:2000, smoothMoveAccelerationTime:500,
  posColor:"lightgray",posFontSize:"8pt",posFontWeight:"normal",posFontFamily:"verdana",
  scaleMaxLen:90, scaleHeight:6, scaleColor:"lightgray", scaleLineWidth:1
};
new SkyWindow2(options).attach($('mySkyWnd'));
</script>

One important detail: If you want to show object info labels while moving mouse over the map. You need to add simple proxy script on your server to redirect AJAX calls to WikiSky servers. The reason is that browser’s JavaScript security policy does not allow to make AJAX call to any server except the one current page loaded from.

Here’s an example of simple php code:


<?php
include("HttpClient.class.php");
$u=$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
$client = new HttpClient("server1.sky-map.org");
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') {
   $client->post('/'.$u, file_get_contents("php://input"));
} else {
   $client->get('/'.$u);
}
$contentType = $client->getHeader("Content-Type");
$pageContents = $client->getContent();
header('Content-type: '.$contentType);
echo $pageContents;
?>

SPAM update

Ok, we finished recovering from massive spam attack on our forum (see previous posts). The forum is back on-line now. It is possible we accidentally killed few of your good posts. Sorry about that, there was quite a lot of junk to sort out.

WikiSky on Facebook

I have created group on the Facebook for our users and contributors. If you’ve got a Facebook account – feel free to join our fans club at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=162637622782

SPAM

In last few days our forums have been heavily attacked by spammers, causing partial denial of service. About 150,000 spam posts have been submitted in just few days. Forums are off line now. We still recovering from the attack. Dear SPAMMERS. C’mon, aren’t you have anything better to do? I’d rather now been doing some useful stuff on the site, rather than spend hours cleaning up your mess.

GALEX survey updated to GR5

We have updated our ultraviolet GALEX survey with the latest GR5 (http://galex.stsci.edu/GR4/) release. It contains 870 new tiles of sky coverage from the primary mission surveys.  In addition, 266 GR4 tiles were delivered with extended exposure times. Since GR5 was processed with the same pipeline as GR4, it may be considered a supplement to GR4. You can access updated survey following this link: http://www.wikisky.org/?zoom=1&img_source=GALEX

100 Hours of Astronomy

100 Hours of Astronomy is a global astronomy event from 2 to 5 April when you can discover the Universe with the rest of the world!  A project of the International Year of Astronomy, there are free public activities happening all around the world, and online right here.