Sky Map Online - Implemented Features List

- The original porting of my application (and stripping down the client specific features)
- Find a domain name and hosting solution
- Come up with an optimization for picking the right objects when dealing with a high zoom level
- Create the web interface
- Location support – find location by IP or by a specified address, city or zip code
- Deal with a googlebot issue – it crawled my staging (testing) website “obscuring” my production server
- Determine client local time zone
- Make the size of the skymap customizable
- Display constellation name
- Messier list
- Create customizable toolbar and navigation controls (in javascript)
- Object information and search
- Support for more than 1 million objects from Tycho2 catalog
- Draggable map: use tiles, move all map logic from server to client, actually a complete redesign to support a better user experience
- Moon and planetary data - calculate dinamically their RA/Dec coordinates
- Rise and set times
- 3D effect for sky map borders (use gradients)
- gradients for bright stars (to look like spheres)
- replace gif with png files to support transparency
- label improvements (tranparency and more info)
- Alt/Az and RA/Dec data in labels
- AltAz grid and telrad
- move the website from Montreal to Houston
- clean up the keywords, meta tags, etc
- UI redesign - no more asp.net controls clutter on top - now replaced by expandable menu
- site navigation controls on left side - prepare to add more information and move my astronomy blog on this site
- handle the mousewheel (zoom on mousewheel)
- options to show/hide constellation names and constellation lines
- Share map (sky map links to be shared with friends or saved locally for future use)
- Sky Map (menus and controls) translated to Spanish, German and Romanian (localization based on the browser language)
- publish all 88 Constellations maps (Constellation section of this site)
- crete a site map (to be used by search engines)
- Comments page - users can add comments directly on this site
- HTML5 Sky Map basic implementation - the map is created on the client side and, the overall experience should be better (faster load time, hover support, better zoom experience, etc)
- recognize the constellation trivia game
- Main page tweaks - more stars displayed at high zoom levels
- release of SkyMap for Windows Phone 7 (wp7.aspx page added to this website)