SkyServer offers live streaming of astronomical data, allowing users to specify the intervals at which data is saved to file.
The software's astronomy libraries are written in Delphi-mode extended Pascal and have a ten-year pedigree. They are proven, stable, fast and arc-second accurate, serving as the computation engine behind reputed software products such as Adastra, Coeli Stella 2000, DeskNite, and several other shareware titles for MS Windows.
SkyServer's initial data set is comprehensive, comprising a 15,695-star selection from the Yale and Hipparcos catalogs, Critical, NEO, bright and transneptunian asteroids, DSOs, comets, sun, moon & planets, and linesets for drawing, including constellation lines, boundaries, grids, aequator, ecliptic, horizon, galactic equator, polar points, and Milky Way. Moreover, users can obtain extensions from Coeli, featuring the complete SAO and Hipparcos star catalogs, regularly updated orbital elements for comets and asteroids, and nearly 300 extra star names and associated notes.
SkyServer provides your data in digestible form, readable by both human and software. There are two primary file formats: "record jar" and rdb tables. The latter can be manipulated at the command line without modification using a relational database tool such as NoSql. The record jar file is designed to be read in by a display script or simply perused by the user.
While the Coeli engine that SkyServer is built upon has been tried and tested to production standard and been in constant development for over a decade, the SkyServer POSIX daemon itself is a first beta release. It needs testers and contributors, and the aim is to offer a free, comprehensive, complete, yet extensible backend for astronomy scripting. This will render the previously daunting task of creating personalized astronomical applications for web or desktop a trivial matter.
SkyServer is compatible with different programming languages, including C, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, and shell. It provides the celestial data in real-time, right down to the screen coordinates of each object in its database, pixel-ready. Your display script will not need to do a single calculation.
New features were added to the recent release of SkyServer, including a command line parser incorporating a brief help page, version, options, and licensing information. Documentation was expanded to include instructions on runtime control via IPC signals. Planet, comet, and asteroid displays were added to the SkyShow GTK+ frontend, and the title-bar's N/S E/W "facing" bug was fixed.
Overall, SkyServer is an excellent software for those who need real-time celestial data for their astronomy applications. Its easy-to-use features make it the go-to choice for processing astronomical data either textually or graphically.
Version 0.0.5: N/A