When someone emails me asking to link to a site of theirs, I tend to ignore the email. Too much spam! But I’ll make an exception here, for sure.
Check out Sky-Map. It’s an interactive all-sky map, and it’s web-based. This is a piece of software that is sorely needed. There are lots of skymap websites out there, but few are really useful in the way I need… like finding out if Saturn is close to a bright star tonight, or if the Moon is near a planet. I have software on my PC I use (TheSky by Software Bisque if you’re curious; I use the old version 5 because I don’t like 6 as much, and it runs too slowly on my PC which is a bit long in the tooth), but I want something portable.
With Sky-Map, you can look at positions of objects, set your time and location and see what’s up now, and more. It’ll even show you the Sloan Digital Sky Survey image of an area of the sky, if available. My one major complaint: I’d like to see the constellation names displayed as a default, since sometimes the outlines aren’t all that familiar to me– and I’m fairly familiar with the sky and constellations. But that’s a quibble.
It’s a cool piece of coding, and you’ll have fun poking around. Enjoy.
