Another good news – we’ve got faster internet connections on two of our servers – sky3 and sky7. We use these servers to handle mostly “heavy” on CPU tasks and the only servers that allowed to produce extralarge snapshots (16+ megapixels)

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Astro-Overlay demo

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If you want to add this interface to your page, simply add this line of code at the end of your html file, before </body> tag:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://sky-map.org/js/astroOverlay'></script>

Moreover, you can simply add this interface right in your browser to any page you are visiting by simply putting following code in browser’s location (URL) following by <Enter>:

javascript:a=document.createElement('script');a.src='http://sky-map.org/js/astroOverlay';a.onload=function(){astroOverlay()};document.body.appendChild(a);void+0

or put that line in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar, and by clicking on it current page you are visiting will be enriched with the AstroOverlay interface (currently doesn’t work in Internet Explorer). The interface is new and we are still working on fixing bugs and user experience improvements. Feel free to give it a try and let us know what’s your experience with this new feature.

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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.

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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

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