D3-Celestial: Better Names in General, and Simpler

Another naming feature for D3-Celestial: A global override to consistently change all the object names to the same kind, with the select box below called, surprisingly "Object Names". With this setting all object types that have the chosen language available. A further new switch hides some of the more advanced settings to simplify the form, and only leaves the new global override for language changes. It is — also surprisingly — called "Advanced Options."

The relevant new options in the configuration file are pretty simple:

  advanced: true,     // Display fewer form fields if false 
  lang: "",           // Global language override for names, any name setting that has the chosen language available
                      // Default:desig or empty string for designations, other:
    // (ar) Arabic, (cn) Chinese, (cz) Czech, (en) English, (ee) Estonian, (fi) Finnish, (fr) French, (de) German,  
    // (gr) Greek, (il) Hebrew, (in) Hindi, (it) Italian, (jp) Japanese, (kr) Korean, (lat) Latin, (ir) Persian, 
    // (ru) Russian, (es) Spanish, (tr) Turkish  

D3-Celestial released under BSD license. Copyright 2015-20 Olaf Frohn.

Blank Sky Maps

I often get searches for blank sky maps, so I thought I'd do just that. Problem is, how blank, in what coordinate system, and in which projection. See, there are quite a lot of knobs to twiddle. So let me just give a few examples here. Suggestions/requests are welcome.

First: Equatorial coordinates, in Winkel-Tripel projection with coordinate grid on white background. Projection-wise, probably the best compromise between length- area- and shape-distortions that come inevitably with every map projection.

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Galactic coordinates in Mollweide projection. Nothing better than Mollweide (or Hammer-Aitoff, see below) for galactic maps, with the origin, i.e. the center of the milky way, right in the middle.

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Ecliptic coordinates, this time on a black background, with the simplest of all projection, equirectangular, thats, really just a linear mapping of coordinates to area.

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And something completely different, supergalactic coordinates in Hammer-Aitoff projection. The supergalactic plane is the one in which the local filament of galaxy clusters seems to be oriented, visualized here with all galaxies brighter than 12th magnitude in red.

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Stellar data from the Hipparcos catalogue, with stars down to magnitude 7 shown, galaxies from the handy Saguaro Astronomy Club Database, and map projections according to USGS's fabulous Map Projections: A Working Manual by John P. Snyder. And milky way data from PP3