For the past couple of weeks SkyView has not been able access data from the WISE archive. SkyView queries for WISE images in regions already in our cache worked fine, but users who requested a new region got back a blank image. This behavior seems to have started around June 27.
The problem arose when WISE inadvertently changed the URL’s they published the data under (using the VO Simple Image Access Protocol) to a format that was really only intended for internal use. In particular it used a non-standard port number, rather than the standard HTTP port 80. The firewall that our web servers are behind does not permit access to unregistered, non-standard ports, so our servers were unable to download new data.
The WISE team fixed the problem immediately upon being notified of it and all should be back to normal. We apologize for the time it took to discover this problem. The normal behavior requests in cached regions concealed the problem from our regular checks.
Do you have any suggestions of good sky viewing apps for a trucker like me? I love stopping and looking at the sky on my breaks, but an app the could help enrich the experience would be excellent.
Thanks for your time!
Allen,
There is a completely unrelated application for Iphones called Skyview which seems to get some good press — we occasionally need to field queries about it. There are lots of really nice planetarium programs but laptop is really best for viewing them.
Regards, Tom
failures may occur due to security programs?
Our firewall is fairly strict. Outgoing access to non-standard ports is limited for our servers.