AstroPlanner

There was a recent posting on the AstroPlanner Yahoo group that got me to thinking about how to improve the user-contributed plan database and downloading procedure. In V1.6 it leaves a lot to be desired. Without further ado, here’s the new V2 way of doing things…

Firstly, when you upload a plan to the database, you now have to specify a category for the plan. This consists of up to three levels. The first level is selected from a fixed list. The next two levels can either be selected from the comboboxes’ pull-down menu, or typed in if an appropriate entry isn’t present in the list.

The on-line database is now hierarchical, and is built based on the categories embedded in the uploaded plans. When you download from AstroPlanner, you can choose your plans from a whole mess of options.

The first option (hierarchy level) contains the ten most recently uploaded plans.

Note that you can choose as many as you like to download using the checkboxes. You can also use the checkboxes in the hierarchy to select or deselect entire hierarchies.

The next option lists all of the plans, sorted in various orders (in this example, by number of objects). Note that a particular plan can appear in many places in the hierarchy.

The next option is to choose based on the category itself. You can dig down through the hierarchy to find exactly what you want.

The final option is to find plans based on what types of objects are inside them.

Here we’re looking at all plans containing one or more galaxies, sorted in descending order of number of galaxies in the plan (in [square brackets]).

Stuff not implemented yet will include a search feature that will add a list of plans containing text that you specify.

Late Breaking

I just added the above-mentioned search feature. Each time you use it, it adds another “node” containing any plans that match the search string.

Also, if you are not a registered (paid) user of V2 you will be restricted to selecting only those plans that include objects from the 3 base catalogues (Messier, NGC or Bright Star), as shown below.