Recent changes to the website

This page lists some of the recent improvements to the website.

March 28 2024

Added a "View Timeline" option to the Browse interface. It has only taken me n → ∞ years to integrate my hvega Haskell package into this viewer...

March 21 2024

Added the Browse option which provides access to the database using a World Wide Telescope based interface . Of note in this interface is the embedding of the some of the Schedule and Explore interfaces: for example, for observations you can easily find out where other objects of this type (such as a Gamma-Ray burst or a Supernova Remnant) are located on the sky!

March 20 2024

A banner has been added to most pages pointing to the current NASA budget situation.

February 8 2024

The Twitter feed from @chandraXRAY has been removed from the front page as the Javascript widget does not seem to be working properly and I have no desire to dig around in that code. The source code has moved from bitbucket to GitHub, and I've moved over to Mastodon.

November 19 2020

The auto-complete fields on the Explore page - that is the target and proposal name searches - has seen improvements which should improve their behavior.

November 18 2020

The WWT views have been updated from HTML5 to WebGL versions, which should not make any difference (I hope) other than allowing https support and continuing to work in the future!

June 13 2019

Also known as the "how-time-flies" release. This updates the sub-arrays view to make the diisplay a bit-more interactive (you can see the breakdown by starting row and width), but it is still missing all those links I promised you.

March 31 2019

Today's inspirational family-movie afternoon™ was Apollo 13, so we now have the initial view of how ACIS sub-arrays are used. This will improve - and contain more links - soon, I promise.

March 28 2019

The Explore Chandra page has been slightly spruced up, mainly because we have a whole new way of looking at the observations: a break down by exposure time, breaking the data up into ten-percent chunks.

March 24 2019

The inspiration continues unabated! You can now jump to views of all observations with the same constraints as the selected observation (from both the summary text about the observation and the detailed view). Try it out on this recent observation of a gravitational-wave event.

March 23 2019

After a family trip to go and see Apollo 11 (which I highly recommend), I felt inspired. Inspired enough to add "external link" identifiers - namely - to links that take you to another website (this does not happen on all links, such as many of the background or informational pages).

February 26 2019

The sneaky Chandra schedulers have started observing targets from the "Cool Catalog Target" list, and so I've updated the proposal-search page to include these CCT targets.

February 16 2019

You can now select other observations in the "Interactive" view and see basic information - target name, observation number, instrument, and state - on it. The window can be dragged around or closed if it is getting in your way. For busy areas it can be hard to select a particular observation!

February 15 2019

As a post-Valentine's gift, the "Interactive" view now shows all Chandra observations that are in the database. A "Hide other FOVs" button has been added to allow you to toggle their display, since it can be distracting in highly-observed areas, such as near M31 or the Galactic Center.

February 13 2019

A pre-Valentine's present to you all: the "Interactive" view of an observation now shows the location of other Chandra observations taken nearby (assuming you don't pick a "lonely source"). Please expect some tweaks to the interface, such as the ability to hide these other observations, in the coming days.

January 28 2018

There have been significant enhancements to the "Interactive" view of an observation (which uses the WorldWide Telescope web client). You can now select the background image (the default is still from the Digitized Sky Survey, but several wavebands spanning from long (Cosmic Microwave Background) to short (Gamma ray) wavelengths. An option to toggle the display of the constellations and the boundaries of the constellations has also been aded. As a final note, the area showing these options can be minimised, or dragged around the WWT display, if it gets in your way.

January 22 2018

Scrolling in the "Interactive" view of an observation, which uses the WorldWide Telescope web client, now no-longer causes the whole page to scroll, which makes zooming into or out of the image a lot nicer. Apologies that it took so long to solve this niggle!

January 21 2018

The coverage of the early part of the mission has been improved, with the first entry now mid-August of 1999, as well as filling some gaps in the database. The coverage can be seen on the calendar view.

August 26 2017

The proposal abstracts for virtually all of the proposals have been added. At present they are only available from the proposal page - for example the page about the Extreme rotation measures and high-redshift clusters proposal - but more visualizations (such as the obligatory word cloud), and search functionality, are planned.

August 3 2017

The "Details" view now provides a link to the schedule of all observations in that Cycle.

August 2 2017

The links to the previous and next observations on the main page have hopefully been made more obvious.

July 22 2017

The links to the different views of an observation have been changed to be a bit-more informative; they now say "Optical", "X-ray (RASS)", "X-ray (PSPC)", and "Interactive" rather than "DSS", "RASS", "PSPC", and "WWT".

July 20 2017

Added a database section to the about page. This currently lists the time the database was last updated and a brief summary of the size of the database, but will hopefully soon contain some more background information.

July 17 2017

Reduced the time taken to create the data needed for the timeline view of the database. More work is needed as you still have to wait too long for the data to download.

July 15 2017

Included the text of the proposal abstracts, taken from the rather useful SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (it is the go-to service for Astronomers searching the Astronomical literature). This text - if available - is included in the "Proposal view"; an example is A detailed Chandra study of the luminous lensing cluster MS2137.3-2353. Unfortunately I have not been able to match up all observations, in particular recent observations are not matched.

The link to the optical and X-ray views of an observation have been fixed for observations with a value (ObsId) less than 10000. Note that very-early observations are still broken (in that the images will not display).

July 8 2017

Reduced the download time for some of the more-complex search results - such as viewing all the ACIS-I observations. There are still improvements to make!

July 1 2017

The view of the actual Chandra data for an observation (once it is public), on both the observation page and in the timeline view, has been disabled as it was causing an unexpected burden on the Chandra Data Archive. It will be added back once we have come up with a less-disruptive scheme.

June 28 2017

The exposure-time breakdown page has been cleaned up slightly: the proposal cycles are now listed in numerical order (they were in a somewhat-random order before) and a table listing the breakdown of total exposure-time per cycle has been added. As a by-product of this there is now a per-cycle view of the observations, such as everyone's favourite Cycle 7.

The documentation has been updated to reflect the fact that the database has now been filled up with data back to the start of the mission (unfortunately it's not complete, in particular the early observations are currently missing).

Some minor speed improvements have been applied, since the addition of all the historical data was stressing the design. More improvements are to come!