Today at 6 PM EDT we celebrate the sidereal anniversary of the public release of the new Java based SkyView web site. Completely changing our server-side hardware and software, CGI scripts and documentation was a bit of a risk, but with just a few hiccups everything worked out pretty well. We have been pleased with how smoothly the initial transition went and with how the system has worked over the past year.
SkyView has generated about 1.8 million images in this year. The VLSS, IRIS, BAT and GALEX surveys have been released and the RASS background surveys have been completely updated. All of the DSS and DSS2 data is now incorporated as local data in SkyView. In the next year we plan on releasing a new survey publication interface so users can add their own surveys to SkyView. SkyView surveys have been incorporated with Microsoft’s new WorldWideTelescope and serve images to Caltech’s VIM tool.
The new Java software had lots of new capabilities and makes it much easier to adapt software to new circumstances. We’ve added a few new projections: Arc, Sfl, Stg and TOAST. There are new capabilities for running batch scripts. Users can see exactly where each output pixel is sampled. New image finders were customized to handle the GALEX surveys. A JavaScript widget that translates pixel locations to coordinates has been added to the Web display. And there are many minor changes and a few bug fixes. With our new framework it has been much easier to add new capabilities and make changes without increasing the complexity of the underlying code.
Overall we believe this has been a good year. Let us know what you’d like to see in SkyView over the coming year.