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Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Your Sky and Solar System Live Updates
I have posted an overhaul of the Web pages supporting Your Sky and Solar System Live. The Your Sky Object Catalogues for asteroids by name, asteroids by number, and periodic comets now include links both to show the current position of the object in the sky in Your Sky and, for objects in non-hyperbolic orbits, plot the orbit in Solar System Live, automatically selecting a plot of the inner or full solar system depending upon the semi-major axis of the object's orbit.
The Object Catalogue files have been upgraded in style and typography from the 1990s to the eve of the Roaring Twenties, and a common CSS file defines the style for all files. The automatically-generated catalogues for asteroids and comets are all now XHTML 1.0 Strict (some of the other catalogues remain Transitional); all have passed validation. A new logo was developed which is compatible with a white background and used in all of the pages. All static GIF files in the Your Sky document tree have been converted to PNG. Information in the Object Catalogue planets page for Pluto has been updated to reflect data from the New Horizons fly-by.
All of the request pages for Your Sky maps which contain the latitude and longitude of the observer's site now use a free geolocation server to guess the requester's location from their IP address. (This is dodgy, but even when it falls on its face, it's usually better than the alternative of simply filling in Fourmilab's co-ordinates until the user enters something else.) The main Your Sky pages are now all XHTML 1.0 Strict. (Some of the help file pages remain Transitional.)
Posted at
23:16
