Fwd: New tools for planetary astrophotographers

[James Willinghan]

Hi all - 

Want to forward this email from my friend Wayne Jaeschke in Pennsylvania who put together some new tools for Astronomy, astrophotography planning, etc. He just sent this out for release now and if you try it and see any bugs he can be reached at w...@exosky.net. Here is his email…

James 

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded 



Hi all,

 

Over the years I’ve searched through many different sites to get information for astrophotography, image session planning, seeing forecasts, etc.  So when I set to update my website recently, I decided to collect all the tools and calculators for astrophotography that I could find into one spot.  Then I decided to go a step further and create all new tools with the exact functionality I wanted and make it a desktop ‘web app’ that could run offline, had minimal data requirements, and didn’t rely on a server that could shut down.  Also, I didn’t want to buy or subscribe to anything, create an account anywhere, or see a lot of ads.  I also wanted it to have a Star Trek like theme, of course.

 

Unfortunately, I had absolutely no idea how to do any of that.  What I did have was a large number of usage tokens for Anthropic’s Fabled AI model and a pretty good idea of what I wanted it to look like.  I worked with Claude to build it piece by piece, but the final result speaks for itself.  Please visit the following link to learn about the tools (there are 17 of them for everything from local seeing/weather to ISS passes at your location).  I also added as many astronomy related calculators as I could think of, to have them all in one place.

 

If you use the desktop app, you can save your imaging locations for use in the session planners (there are two, one for planets and one for DSO’s).  Please have a look and let me know if there are any bugs or addition features that would be useful.  Since everything occurs in your own browser and the only traffic to my site is for updates (the app updates automatically when there are changes), there is no ongoing cost with the tools so there’s no charge to use them, no need for an account anywhere, and no ads.

 

https://astrophotos.space/exosky-astro-tools/

 

Also, while Claude was developing code for the site, I also had him scan all of my old hard drives for data to rebuilt my website log entries going back to 2010 with all my old images.  I was going to set aside a few months to do that.  Claude did it on Tuesday.. after lunch.

 

I hope you find the tools as useful as I do.

 

Regards,

 

Wayne

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