Stars on the blog

I've added planets and stars to my sky when the sun sets. Best thing is, these are technically accurate. The sun follows the correct path across the sky and sets at the right time. The sky shows the view facing South from London.

Future updates:

1. CLEAN THE CODE. Please don't even look until I've tidied things up.
2. ADD THE MOON. Der, where is it?
3. Add Constellations. Orion is visible, but others are harder to spot. I need lines, and JavaScript doesn't play nice with lines.
4. Add rotation, and lat/long changes. These are easy, but I'm not too bothered at the moment.
5. Add info and correct colours to planets.
6. Expand the area to view the whole sky. On the way...
7. Change the date. (Currently, you have to use the system clock)

Credits to:

• http://home.att.net/~srschmitt/script_planet_orbits.html for calculations. Very nice clear code. Thanks.
• Sky and Telescope for their useful skychart which I checked against, and got some star info from.

Apologies to IE users.  It might be a bit slow... :)
Update: I've removed the faint stars from IE, so it works faster. Doesn't look as good though.

Let me know what you think! Was it worth it?

Thanks for reading! I guess you could now share this post on TikTok or something. That'd be cool.
Or if you had any comments, you could find me on Threads.

Published 17 February 2008