SKY-MAP.ORG / WIKISKY » WikiSky

New video on Nibiru

WikiSky — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 06:49:09 +0000

Message to spammers

admin — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 01:01:40 +0000

Dear spammers,
I spend last three days fighting server crashes, until I found there were hundreds of thousands of spam comments in “The Collection” area posted by spam bot. It was causing significant load on data base and memory. Our servers are running at peak of its capacities and cannot host zillions of your links.
Could you please be so kind to stop posting non-relevant comments on WikiSky site.
Thank you for your understanding!

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Unplanned server upgrade

admin — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:51:27 +0000

We had disk failure on one of our servers and had to use part of our raised funds to purchase two new 750GB hard drives for total of $260. We replaced older array of two 360GB disks. Though it is still not enough to hold all images, there is now more space to breath and hold traffic until we raise enough funds for new servers. Thank you everyone for your support!

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SDSS-III cleaner version has been released

admin — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 10:14:05 +0000

We’ve done some cleaning on new SDSS-III survey. New version is now available online. Basically we lowered priorities on drawing “dirty” SDSS frames on main survey, leaving cleaner frames on top. Though all SDSS frames are still available from list of images on starview pages. There still few minor spots left to clean. Next major thing to deal with would be the frame edges that sometimes, especially on bright objects causing significant defects – check out M31 for example. Due to limited resources on our primary two servers, we keep most of the new SDSS-III data on our temporary assigned servers sitting on slower internet link, so expect slower access to the survey until we upgrade our primary servers.

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New SDSS-III sky survey is now available on WikiSky

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:10:15 +0000

We have added sky images from latest data release of Sloan Digital Sky Survey – SDSS-III DR8

The release contains all of the imaging data taken by the SDSS imaging camera, now covering 1/3 of the whole sky (over 14,000 square degrees out of 41,253 square degrees of whole sky)
In addition all existing images from previous data releases have been rebuilt with higher quality. The imaging survey contains about a million fields 3 mega pixels each, that totals to 3 Terra pixels of imaging data.
Latest release is available as “SDSS-III DR8″ from “DSS” menu on front page. It also replaces DR7 survey for default “SDSS” survey id in direct link, i.e. http://wikisky.org/?object=M51&img_source=SDSS. Previous DR7 is available using “SDSS7″ survey id: as http://wikisky.org/?object=M51&img_source=SDSS7. We still working on some image defects cleanup. New update will be available shortly.

We’ve received several requests from our users for ability to invert colors of sky map images for printing purpose. You can now find “Negative” checkbox on our snapshot tool page.

Due to constantly growing visitors traffic to our resource and growing amount of data available on sky-map our existing servers reached its capacities and require a serious upgrade. We have opened fundraiser campaign. Please read this page for details. We would appreciate any help. Thank you!

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January 2011 status update

admin — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:43:49 +0000

End of 2010 was quite hot for our servers. Visitors traffic grown from usual 300,000 visits per month to over 1,500,000 visits in December alone. Our poor 6 years old servers reached it’s capacities on all ends – processors power, disks space and IO performance. We had to shut down some services in order to keep our servers up.

In other news, Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) last week released new version – SDSS-III (DR8). It is most significant update since probably DR3. It now covers 1/3 of whole sky. In addition all existing fields has been rebuild with higher quality. The imaging survey contains about a million fields 3 mega pixels each, that totals to 3 Terra pixels of imaging data (compare to 1 Terra pixel of whole sky DSS2 sky survey). We are currently working on adding new SDSS data to our sky map.

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Support Wikipedia

admin — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 21:10:13 +0000

In my opinion Wikipedia is absolutely the greatest information resource on Internet. It showed true meaning of Internet itself – open share of Knowledge with ability to contribute to it by everyone. It inspired our project. WikiSky team contributed a lot, specifically into astronomical section – information and imagery data.
Support Wikipedia.
Happy New Year!

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update on AstroOverlay and other stuff

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 15:40:26 +0000

Recently we did cleanup and performance optimization on out new Astronomical Image Overlay interface. It is ready now for significant traffic hits.

By the way, about traffic: Last Friday our servers have been flooded by “bored visitors” , I mean visitors from www.i-am-bored.com web site. I must admit – there is a lot of “bored” surfers on the Net. Our traffic more than doubled. It was a good and pretty successful test for our latest build with a lot of effort put toward performance optimization and stability increase.

Another good news – we’ve got faster internet connections on two of our servers – sky3 and sky7. We use these servers to handle mostly “heavy” on CPU tasks and the only servers that allowed to produce extralarge snapshots (16+ megapixels)

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short demo on how does astro-overlay link works

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 16:13:31 +0000

The short video below demonstrates how you can enrich any online astronomical image with WikiSky’s AstroOverlay features right in your browser just by using javascript link described in previous post

Astro-Overlay demo

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Sky-Map.org (WikiSky) on BBC

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:54:40 +0000

Sky-Map.org (WikiSky) was featured on BBC’s Webscape TV programme over last weekends. Thousands of new visitors, mostly from England, put quite a load on our servers.

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