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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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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<script type='text/javascript'
   src='http://wikisky.org/js/skywindow2'></script>
<div style='position:relative;left:0px;top:0px;width:450px;height:450px'>
<DIV id='mySkyWnd'
  style='position:absolute;left:0;top:0;width:450px;height:450px;overflow:hidden;border:1px solid gray'
  onmouseout='hideddrivetip();'></DIV></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var options = {ra:12.4283, de:12.81, initZoom:6, zoom:6,
  survey:"", imgSource:"DSS2", allowTopPanel:true, showTopPanel:true, showRightPanel:false,
  allowMove:true, allowZoom:true,
  showPanZoomControl:true, panZoomControlLeft:6, panZoomControlTop:10,
  showScale:true, showStatus:false, showPosition:true, showStickers:true, showLabels:true,
  jpegQuality:0.8,
  showGrid:true, showOverlayGrid:false,
  showConstLines:true, showOverlayConstLines:false,
  showConstBoundaries:true, showOverlayConstBoundaries:false,
  showConstNames:false, showOverlayConstNames:false,
  showGalaxies:true, showOverlayGalaxies:false,
  showStars:true, showOverlayStars:false,
  buffer:1, moveTime:2000, smoothMoveAccelerationTime:500,
  posColor:"lightgray",posFontSize:"8pt",posFontWeight:"normal",posFontFamily:"verdana",
  scaleMaxLen:90, scaleHeight:6, scaleColor:"lightgray", scaleLineWidth:1
};
new SkyWindow2(options).attach($('mySkyWnd'));
</script>

One important detail: If you want to show object info labels while moving mouse over the map. You need to add simple proxy script on your server to redirect AJAX calls to WikiSky servers. The reason is that browser’s JavaScript security policy does not allow to make AJAX call to any server except the one current page loaded from.

Here’s an example of simple php code:

<?php
include("HttpClient.class.php");
$u=$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
$client = new HttpClient("server1.sky-map.org");
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') {
   $client->post('/'.$u, file_get_contents("php://input"));
} else {
   $client->get('/'.$u);
}
$contentType = $client->getHeader("Content-Type");
$pageContents = $client->getContent();
header('Content-type: '.$contentType);
echo $pageContents;
?>

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DSS2 all sky image (aitoff projection)

SDSS all sky image (aitoff projection)

RASS3 all sky image (aitoff projection)

GALEX all sky image (aitoff projection)

Astrophoto all sky image (aitoff projection)

IRAS (infrared) all sky image (aitoff projection)

H-Alhpa all sky image (aitoff projection)

We have updated images at top zoom level (0). We already had 0-zoom images for IRAS, H-Alpha, astrophoto and SKY-MAP surveys. New images include DSS2, SDSS, RASS3 and GALEX surveys. Also astrophoto updated with latest images. The top level images represent whole sky in aitoff projection with center in R.A.=12^h, Dec.=0°

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