Last modification:
2007-03-26
2007-03-26
This sections is going to describe two parts of the operations of the planetarium. First of all, there will be a short description for the end user of how to control the planetarium application, followed by adminisrtative instruction of how to regularly update and maintain the planetarium.
As the application is based on the Google Maps API, most users should be quite familiar with how to control the planetarium.
The controls in the upper left corner of the screen allow you to move within the planetarium and a zoom bar allows you to zoom in or out on the sky. You can also move around holding the left mouse button down, then dragging the image.
By clicking on a star, in the standalone version of the planetarium, a detailed popup window will appear with information about the star. In the GWT version, a seperate dialog window will open and query external sites for complete information about the star. Leaving the mouse pointer over an object for more than one second will also show information on the object as a small pop-up window which will disappear again as soon as you move the mouse.
You can reset the planetariums view by clicking the central button of the navigational controls in the upper left corner.
For now, the planetarium is meant to be operated with precreated images for a limited time span. Precisely this time span could be 24 hours. As the view of the sky at a certain time will repeat every 24 hours with only unnotable changes talking about a few days or weeks only, one could created tile images for every minute of the current day and use these images for a few weeks in the planetarium application.
Thus one would have to update the tile images every few days or weeks, i.e. have the adapted version of Mobile Star Chart recreate them. As mentioned before this can be done by running the application and hitting the enter button on the main window of the application.
Nearly every option of the program can be tweaked in the StarChart.java file and comments right next to the source code explain the effects of most of these options.
Nevertheless, there's a few options worth mentioning. The time for drawing the sky chart, if not set otherwise, will be initialized with the systems current time. The location is set to the campus of the Faculty for Computer Science of the Polytechnical University of Madrid located somewhat outside of Madrid. The output loop is adjusted to created tile images for every minute of the current day starting at 00:00 and ending at 23:59. Any of these options can be easily changed in the source code.
