Re: star charts

[Stupendous Man <richmond@stupendous.cis.rit.edu>]

  I agree, very nice.  There are a couple of things I might suggest:

     a) increase the size of the active area around the faintest stars.
        While using my laptop with its trackpad last night, I was unable 
        to move my cursor to just the right area.

     b) it might be more convenient for some people if the detailed
        data wasn't gzipped

     c) every time I click on a star, the datafile which is downloaded
        is called "GetObject" on my local computer.  Might it be possible
        to give a unique name to each object's detailed data?

     d) a lot of people would find this more useful if the coordinates
        were translated to HH:MM:SS.s form in the little pop-up windows

  Now for some changes that require some real effort ...

     e) it would be nice to show any star which has a variability index
        (Welch-Stetson, or any other you care to choose) as the same
        old solid circle you currently draw, PLUS a dotted circle 
        surrounding the solid circle.  This would match the symbol used
        to designate variable stars in some atlases.  Perhaps the
        user might be allowed to vary the level of the variability
        index?

     f) (optional) coordinate lines would be nice.  A simpler addition
        would be a scale bar with little arrows pointing North and East

  Question: are these charts orthographically "correct" -- meaning, 
do they show distances between stars accurately, even at the poles? --
or are they simply Mercator projections?  Doing the projection onto
a plane is a bit of an annoyance, but it makes a big difference
above Dec = +70 or so.  You can find the equations for converting
(RA, Dec) to plate coords (xi, eta) in many places; for example,
go to the paper by Olkin et al.

     http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?
          bibcode=1996PASP..108..202O&db_key=AST&high=39463d35aa26400

and look at page 204, in section 3.2.

  I think that a tool which allows the user to make a chart of 
any area covered by the database would be an excellent addition
to the WWW site!

                                          Michael Richmond