Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Wed, 05/07/2014 - 16:07
Just finished converting my 'alien skies' program to PHP, so will be putting it online soon. At the moment you have two sorts of choices: draw the sky as seen from a dropdown list of notable stars (Arcturus, Algol, Sirius, mu Arae etc) or input your own coordinates. At the moment, this generates an HTML table - obviously printable - of the stars in the alien sky, with their positions and magnitudes as seen from your chosen star. Next up is a graphical display, but that's not quite so simple to do in PHP as in VB6!
As I say, not strictly AAVSO, so I will understand if this post gets moved or trashed.
Hi Kevin,
Interesting! You might want to look into implementing it in d3 (www.d3js.org)
Once Gaia starts returning data, you'll be able to do this to much larger distances! (http://sci.esa.int/gaia/)
Cheers,
Doug
Hi, Sorry but I'm not Kevin, I'm Mike! (ah what the heck, I forgive you) ;-)
D3 looks good for what I'm after. I have to say I hadn't even heard of it. I've actually done something similar in regular JavaScript/DHTML but that wasn't database-based - just a rough-and-ready animation showing how a sample star moves as your viewpoint changes from our solar system to another one.