For the last few years, I have been developing the Ruby library Astronoby (https://github.com/rhannequin/astronoby) with as much dedication and perseverance I could while I don't have any scientific academic background. My end goal was to use this library and build a website that not only provides as much data as possible, but let anyone access and understand how it was computed. This goal is on its was of completion with Caelus.
Of course the website is still quite new and there are many features I will implement in the coming weeks and months, including the ability to set any date, having a global view of the Solar System, having an interactive sky chart, a tool to prepare your observation night, having the website in multiple languages, etc.
I believe astronomical data should be universal and anyone should be allowed to easily access this data, manipulate it, understand how it was generated, and contribute to and with the community.
My goal is to make this project truly collaborative. I am open to feedback, ideas, requests, bugs, everything, to offer the community open source astronomical data.
Thank you all.
Website: https://caelus.siderealcode.net
Source code: https://github.com/rhannequin/caelus
popalchemist•2mo ago
rhannequin•2mo ago
These files provide geometric barycentric data. So they need quite a bunch of transformations and physical corrections to become accurate coordinates usable by an astronomer. That’s Astronoby.
And finally Caelus is the project that uses the final data for astronomy use-cases. My goal is to present data in a nice way, but more importantly to provide a fully open source experience. Everything is open source starting from the ephemeris file up to the website itself. The data on the website is not particularly new, although I’m trying my best to offer a good UX. What is new in my opinion is to be able to trace all the logic that produced it.