Solar System Missions Update 09/2015

My map of all active and future Solar System Missions as of September 1st 2015. So New Horizons will travel to the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, currently residing at 43 AU from the Sun, in 2019. And I'm still sure it will get a nicer name before New Horizons gets there.

Milky Way Halo update

As it turns out, there have been lots of new halo objects discovered over the last few years, especially in the southern hemisphere, where some deep surveys have begun to bring in the goods. Especially the Dark Energy Survey has, as a by-product, netted a whopping 17 objects, most of them around the Magellanic Clouds, and therefore likely part of the Magellanic tidal stream around the Milky Way.

As there is still some sky left not covered by surveys so far, there is certainly more to come. Stay tuned.

[Click on the image for an interactive and embiggenable version]

Milky Way Halo Interactive

Now that I have an interactive sky map, it's time to update the older of my pages to that instead of the static images they contained. First, the Milky Way halo page, with an overview of all the objects orbiting around our home galaxy, like globular clusters, satellite galaxies and tidal streams. It's also an occasion to extend the sky map D3-Celestial to include additional data, in this case all those aforementioned objects, and see how easy that would be.

[Click on the image for an interactive and embiggenable version]

The function to add data looks like this:

Celestial.add({file:<path>, type:[dso|line|star], callback:<function>[, redraw:<function>]});

with the object-literal containing the parameters file - the path to the GeoJSON file containing the data to display, type - the kind of data being added (only dso and line implemented so far) and callback - the function that is called from the D3 json-loading function, which adds the contained objects to the global svg path, in D3-Celestial exported as Celestial.svg. That is all you need if you only want a static display without interaction. See the D3.js documentaion about the details. The last (optional) parameter redraw is called when the display is updated after an interaction and contains a subset of the data-adding instrunctions that is needed to determine the new view state.