New South Dublin Astronomical Website - this may not be news to many of you since it has been online for a couple of months as we have been testing and adding content.
There is a new SDAS website now up and running at
www.southdublinastronomy.org
. We have decided to go with a wiki based system this time, so anyone can contribute to the site.
Since SDAS is mainly an observational group we want to have a very observational focus to the site. To that end we have started compiling an observational guide to the
messier objects
and the
modern constellations
. We have also added the
Irish Astronomical Dictionary
which we know will be of interest to some of you. Sections for other pages will appear later, but we wanted to focus minds on these areas first! Of course if you want to start a page on your favorite aspect of astronomy feel free to
start a page
!
There are other excellent resources online for information on the messier catalogue. Foremost being SEDS and wikipedia. However these tend to focus more on the detailed and technical aspects of the objects, rather than most observers questions of, for example, 'What can I expect to see of
M35
in binoculars?'.
You will notice that some of the messier objects pages already have some explanatory text, a starmap, and images. Many do not. And that's where you all come in! You can
register
with the site and then make any changes you like! If you would like to add information on what can bee seen in
M85
and what equipment is needed then please just
log in
and write! If you have an image for an object that currently doesn't have one then upload it! Don't worry about breaking the site, even if you delete a page by accident the web team can easily restore it. So be bold!
This might sound a bit of a risky way to run a website, but to date our spam protection measures have ensured that the ability to edit the site has not been abused. The web team are notified of all changes and so can quickly react to any vandalising changes made to the site.
So browse through the site, and please feel free to add content as you go!
Cheers,
~Al (SDAS web guy)
p.s. For the technically curious... the site is ran using Mediawiki, which is the same software that powers wikipedia. The starmaps were created using pp3, also the same software used by the constellation section of wikipedia and some of the IFAS handbooks. Spam is controlled by the spam blacklist plugin for mediawiki, we periodically sync the wikipedia blacklist of banned url's with the sdas site. To test this we have had the site operational for the past few months and have only had one incident of spam in that time. Unfortunately its not possible to implement the equation editor on the sdas site due to hosting provider restrictions, however the workaround is to create the equation in wikipedia then upload the image to the sdas site.
  