What does it take to develop a free planetarium software?
There are a couple of answers.
I can say passion, desire to combine my software experience with my hobby
(amateur astronomy), a few scenarios not met by existing software.
But what does it take to finalize a project like this?
Well… the answer depends. First, this website is in
its infancy. And it depends a lot of its users and the feedback I get. It’s done in my spare time… and time
is a fine commodity. I hope I’m not going to run out of it too soon.
I’d say that the success of any project takes a right attitude, a statement that
“we can do this”.
And here’s a little bit of history around SkyMap Online...
Dec 2007 – I got a “junk” telescope, a hobby killer from a local supermarket. I
had a lot of troubles to find the brightest astronomical target (our moon) and
especially to keep it in my field of view; in a few days I got rid of the
telescope convinced that the next telescope (if ever) will be a motorized one
Dec 2008 – got my serious telescope (more details on my
astronomy
section of my blog) – it was a small goto
refractor and I started to enjoy deep space objects; I finally got hooked by the
“astronomy” bug
Jun 2009 – I’ve started to create a small planetarium software (Windows .NET
client application) – I’ve never really released it due to various factors
May 2010 – I’ve finally decided to continue working on my planetarium software
and turn my client app into a webserver
My client app provides a smoother navigation on the map… I had to decide if I
want to translate the app directly into a Silverlight app or take a small detour
and make it friendly to all kind of devices and platforms… So, I got this route
– generate maps as simple jpg files (easy to use even on smart phones).
Eventually, I’ll get back to HTML5 or Silverlight implementation.
There were quite a few steps taken care in the last few weeks:
- The original porting of my application (and stripping down the client specific features)
- Find a domain name and hosting solution
- Come up with an optimization for picking the right objects when dealing with a high zoom level
- Create the web interface
- Location support – find location by IP or by a specified address, city or zip code
- Deal with a googlebot issue – it crawled my staging (testing) website “obscuring” my production server
- Determine client local time zone
- Make the size of the skymap customizable
- Display constellation name
- Messier list
- Create customizable toolbar and navigation controls (in javascript)
- Object information and search
- Support for more than 1 million objects from Tycho2 catalog
- Draggable map: use tiles, move all map logic from server to client, actually a complete redesign to support a
better user experience
- Moon and planetary data - calculate dinamically their RA/Dec coordinates
- Rise and set times