Hellow all. This is not a skychart specific post, but I'm developing an open source Java project and I would like to hear comments/ideas from this community, both from users and (hopefully) also from developers. I'm a professional astronomer from Spain and I have started this project only a few months ago, but based on a previous work during the last 4 years in a math library for astronomical ephemerides. My library is a new effort in this field, most algorithms are probably not implemented in any other planetarium software, so it could also be useful for other projects.
My project is called ClearSKY, and can be found here: http://conga.oan.es/~alonso/doku.php?id=jparsec. A Java JRE 1.5 or later is required for installing, and 1.6 for executing. Anyway, a JRE 1.6 can be installed optionally (strongly recommended) from the installer. One interesting point is that the program automatically updates itself once a week, if a new version is available, so once installed you don't need to worry anymore about updates or newer versions. To start the installation assistant simply: on Linux, wget http://conga.oan.es/~alonso/jparsec/installClearSKY.jar java -jar installClearSKY.jar on Windows, download previous .jar file and double clic on it. (If the ~ symbol is not seen properly, it can be encoded in the browser as %7E) I would like that anyone interested would take the little time required to download and install it and give me some feedback. Currently there are some objectives already reached: easy installation and update, accuracy, performance, and a basic GUI to navigate through the sky. Now I will start next phase of development with a complete GUI. Tomas.
