Some suggestions

[Homam]

This wonderful web app really misses planetarium features. I want to watch the simulated sky as it would be seen from my backyard. Planets, the moon and the sun are missing parts. I love to see the live picture of (at least) the sun in my planetarium software, instead of a yellow disk.
The zoom function needs to display the current FOV.
I enjoyed the Windows Vista gadget, but both the web app and the gadget needs some browser caching, something like what Google Earth does. It seems the current version re-loads the tiles while scrolling out and back to them. At least the tiles around the current field of view need to be cached.
Very nice API, but is it possible to add a method that returns if a part of the sky has SDSS images or not.
And a leap forward: Will you provide 3D view of the universe? I remember some people were working on a web based 3D view of HIP catalog using Microsoft WPF technologies, and wonder if they are related to you.
Thanks for the great job.

[admin]

Hi Homam,

Thank you very much for your comments.
The planetarium feature is on our high-priority tasks list. Many people asking about that.

Not sure what do you mean:

The zoom function needs to display the current FOV.

About caching - there're bit of overhead images for pre-fetching. Some image caching is taken care by browsers, but we're still working on optimizing the cache mechanism.

There's javascript code that checks for SDSS coverage on our site, but if you're interesting in API/XML check - I can easily add it.

No, we are not working on 3D models. Right now we're working on adding more surveys in addition to SDSS.

Regards,
Admin

[drjon]

This is an excellent new site, but would it be possible to have an option to invert the display area for the benefit of antipodean users such as myself?

[admin]

You mean South pole on top? Hm, never thought about that feature. We will put it in our pending task list.

Thank you for the suggestion,
Admin

[drjon]

Wonderful! Thank you.

[f1charlie]

Impressive site!

However, being picky, I have noticed sveral typos and grammatical errors on the English FAQs and Getting Started pages. I would guess that your authors do not have English as their first language (or, as is usual with programmers, want to spend all their time on coding ).

[balatonl]

As I could understand, due to some balancing reasons, there are different sky-map servers (server1...server5.sky-map.org), which load into the bottom frame.

Well, if I reload the page www.sky-map.org, sometimes the server5.sky-map.org is the active one, but server5 does not include the Hungarian deploy.

Could you please correct this bug?

Thank you, regards,

Laci

[admin]

Ah, forgot about server5, thank you.
I took it out from load balancing for now and will update build this week.

Admin

[danielsimz]

Just wanted to say hello to you all. Been lurking around here for a week or so and like the site and “ambience” here.

[DMJY510]

I copied code from various peoples graphics...
I also changed one a little and reposted it (the how much noob are you).
I made some of the code from scratch to get it all together.
Is that all good?