Publications
From WikiSky
BBC Webscape, 20 November 2009
Sky-map.org visualises various galaxies and nebulas from around the universe.
The aim of the sky map is to inform the user by displaying the information gathered so far on each of the sky objects.
The site's search tool can locate specific features, or you can scan through the main attractions using the info panel on the homepage.
TIME (CNN), June 16, 2008, 50 Best Websites 2008
The World Wide Web may be based here on Earth, but it can give you a bird's-eye view of the rest of the universe. WikiSky is a stellar place to start stargazing. Its gorgeous images of comets, galaxies and nebula — many of which come from the NASA-funded Astrophysics Data System at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics — are accompanied by short scientific explanations that will delight astronomy buffs. For a different lens on most objects, click on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which gives you the most realistic, high-res images of the night sky. The publicly and privately funded project, which aims to eventually map about a million galaxies and quasars, uses a massive telescope in Apache Point, N.M., and a 120-megapixel camera to capture its images. For breaking space news and more photos, visit Space.com. To the moon!
- See also TIME ONLINE's The 20 best space websites (WikiSky is #12)
- and PC Magazine's Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites
Very Short List, May 26, 2008, To boldly go where no Wikipedia has gone before
Teleportation and traveling at hyperspeed would be fabulous, but even when we were children, such science-fiction staples struck us as probably, well, impossible. Still, we always imagined that someday we really could have the galactic maps that pop up at the touch of a button in shows like Star Trek. And now, thanks to the Website WikiSky, we can realize our dreams of zooming in on Betelgeuse in glorious detail just by pointing our cursor and commanding, “Make it so!”
Using images compiled from ultra-high-powered telescopes, WikiSky presents an ever-growing visual map of the universe, one that users can update and modify just as they can the more earth-centric Wikipedia. Maybe you’ll appreciate the detailed information, but if you’re like us, you’ll spend most of your time simply gaping at the site’s highlights (helpfully indicated to one side of the home page), such as a magnificent nebula that’s been aptly dubbed the Eye of God.
The Web can’t transport you to deep space (yet!), but staring at close-ups of the sublime Horsehead Nebula is the next-best thing. Happy Memorial Day!
Focus (BBC), June 2007, by Matthew Richards
New Scientist, March 22, 2007, WikiSky brings sky gazing to the (online) masses, by Hazel Muir
Here's the perfect toy for all us townies who’ve had our night goggles fogged over by light pollution from streetlamps - WikiSky. It's an interactive map of the heavens, a sort of Google Earth that looks outwards rather than inwards, as it were.
The site features a map of more than half a billion astronomical objects. You can navigate around it easily by clicking and dragging the map and using a zoom-in/zoom-out sidebar. You can also search on specific objects by name from a database, and it seems pretty tolerant of requests that use informal terms. (Ask for a lobster or a rotten egg and it will find you one.)
The great thing is that you can toggle to a second view, which shows the zoo of weird and wonderful objects recorded by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The SDSS has been mapping the cosmos using a 2.5-metre telescope in New Mexico since 1998.
In SDSS-mode, you can see everything from stellar nurseries to the remnants of exploded stars and huge, swirly galaxies – all in a glorious array of colours. It’s impressively speedy, too. Unfortunately, the SDSS survey doesn’t cover the whole sky, but the patches it has done are mesmerising.
In either mode, a little yellow note pops up when your mouse hovers over an interesting object, and by clicking on it, you link to further information and pictures. If that weren’t enough, the WikiSky team plans to add solar system objects closer to home, so you can watch Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and co as they wander against the starry background. They hope to add images from surveys other than the SDSS as well.
It’s good enough to be addictive already though. I homed in on 55 Cancri, a bright double star that has four Jupiter- and Neptune-class planets in tow. For all we know, it might have a rocky habitable planet like Earth as well.
Makes you think – is some alien out there WikiSky-ing me back?
Hazel Muir, New Scientist writer
SKY NIGHTLY, Feb 01, 2007, Sky-Map Site To Show The Beauty Of The Universe To Everybody
Technological progress has altered many of the ways in which humans live, but has done little to change human beings themselves. Man has been trying to find his place in the world for thousands of years. We are still eager to understand our role in the universe and the universe itself. That is why it is hard enough to find a person who would stay indifferent or apathetic to the questions of cosmology. Those questions strike us immediately when we just glance up towards the night sky.
The Universe is breathtaking. Gazing up at the night sky, even without a telescope, we suddenly start matching our Earth standards to the scope of the whole Universe. Anyone who has observed The Milky Way even once is familiar with the feelings of loneliness and defenselessness. Right away, we imagine our tiny planet sailing through the cold black space.
A child who was once being overwhelmed by the unthinkable beauty and grandiosity of the night sky may not become an astronomer but he will definitely become a thinker.
SKY-MAP.ORG - is an attempt to show the beauty of the Universe to everybody - to small children and to their parents, to the amateur astronomer and to the professional astrophysicist.
SKY-MAP.ORG is an interactive information-management system which encompasses the entire outer space. The basic element of our system is a detailed map of the whole star sky that mirrors more than half a billion celestial objects. No additional instructions are necessary to browse the map or change its scale. The process is very easy. By using the smallest scale, you can view the whole star sky at once. Using the largest scale, you can view tiny areas with the most distant and weakest sky objects.
You can browse the sky either in Map-Mode or in SDSS-mode. (SDSS-mode provides real-time photo images of celestial objects). While in the Map Mode, SKY-MAP searches the system database for information about the objects within a specific area. Then SKY-MAP uses this extracted information to automatically create map images. In SDSS-mode, you can observe star clusters, different galaxies, clouds of cosmic dust - formations of new stars, jets of gas erupting from the active core of distant galaxies, the remains of the supernovas' explosion, among many, many others.
SDSS-mode allows anyone to imagine themselves holding a very powerful telescope in their own hands. And this is true to some extent because a huge 2.5-meter telescope - Apache Point, NM, receives all photo images in real-time that are used in SDSS mode. We make those images available to you by using SDSS service directly. More details can be accessed by visiting www.sdss.org
In either mode, you can simply point your mouse at any sky object and a small pop-up appears displaying the name and a brief description of that object. By clicking on the object, and you instantly have access to detailed information about this star, including articles and different photo images.
You can edit information about different stars by writing your own articles, adding the Internet links or uploading photo images. In doing so, you become an active participant of the project SKY-MAP.ORG
There are other ways to contribute to the development of SKY-MAP.ORG. You can enter the section named "Groups" and create your own group. You will be able to describe your new group, collect or upload miscellaneous materials (articles, links, images...) etc. General articles can be introduced in the section named "Articles". This forum is opened for discussion. And always remember, that your best friends may very well be your most radical opponents.
Whether you develop your own astronomical Internet resource, the API of SKY-MAP.ORG might be very useful for you. By using this API you can gain access to the map, the objects' information and SDSS data. Some functionality is already embodied in the API that has not yet had the analogs in the visual part of the system. For example, it is possible to search objects based on different criteria.
SKY-MAP.ORG is a project that has been developing dynamically from the beginning. Our priority for the future development of this website has always been the expansion of the creative possibilities from all visitors to our website. In our opinion, public visitors should be actively involved in the process of the transformation of SKY-MAP.ORG from a simple Internet-resource to a serious database of the Universe.
Our future plans include:
The display of the objects of our Solar system. The ability to add new objects and place them into catalogues. The ability to do more objects' searches (the search of objects' sets by multiple criteria) The ability to browse the sky's areas in different spectra. The automatic match-up of downloaded images to the sky's objects. The ability for users to add new parameters for the objects. The display (in map mode) of galaxies and other objects aside from stars. Adding other Sky Surveys to the system aside from SDSS.
SKY-MAP.ORG unifies the space's external beauty, which everyone is able to appreciate, and the scientific data represented in either the popular or the special forms. The ability to browse the map dynamically and change the scale at random demonstrates the unity of the phenomena of the absolutely different scales. This possibility links the whole Universe as one object with its separate constituent elements. These unique properties of SKY-MAP.ORG make this resource very popular to people of all ages, cultures, backgrounds, and occupations. As far-reaching as the novice beginner to the sci-fi enthusiast, or anyone with an interest in the stars. As well, it is possible that the simplicity of the system's use, which allows imagining oneself as a space ranger, is capable of attracting a child's attention and interest.
