slowe
commented
9 years ago @ejoliet Apologies for the very slow reply. I've only just seen this message. It is great to know that someone finds it useful! I know my code isn't the best written code in the world so I'm glad you've been able to adapt it.
Unfortunately the zoom only exists for the gnomic projection because that was the most recently added. The other projections use mathematical shortcuts, based on the fact that they had a fixed field of view, to reduce the number of calculations the browser needed to do. Ideally all the projections would be zoomable/draggable/positionable.
Do you have a link to an example of what you've done with it? It would be great to see your implementation and it'll probably give me ideas of improvements and features.
Clear skies.
fphg
ejoliet
Hi! VirtualSky rocks!
First of all, i would like to express my compliments to LCOGT and the people who made posible this software as a useful and easy-to-use (to extend i should say) tool for astronomy community. It is specially difficult to find all those features grouped and combined in a single web display tool.
I've been playing since a couple of days and i don't have any comment or found any bug.
After evaluating all the potential that could give us for the daily processing tasks, i'll made some changes and build a web page that make use of the canvas and the pointers in particular.
It plots the field of view (FoV) pointings in the sky and help tracking galacting plane crossing for high density regions (using default galaxy.json) as well as a 'RealTime' position of Gaia pointings using the staellite scanning attitude.
I've changed the code for our purposes and would like to share the changes because it could be add it to the trunk for general purposes.
For instance, the page shows interactively the position based on custom time steps ((live or at any specific time) on the canvas using 'addPointer' function and 'panTo'.
In order to get more details of the FoV of the display, i've changed the popup info-box to get information of the time of the passing and the FoV (Gaia has 2 FoV, 2 line of sights). Also, as we want to make it interactive, i have add it a function to clear anytime the pointers add it based on a attribute 'idname'. For Gaia, idname = 'gaia'. No surprise ;-)
Those are tiny changes but maybe the 'clear' method could be add it in a general way. A snapshot of crossing position and pointers (each FoV distinguished by diferent pointer color).
One request or nice-to-have: Should the 'zoom' event be available for all projection and not only for the 'gnomic' one.
Thanks again for the effort and such a great tool.
Best regards, E.