Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays, fellow deep-sky observers!
The holiday season feels like the perfect time to share something that we hope will be a valuable resource for the visual astronomy community. For decades now, Adventures in Deep Space (ADS) has been a go-to site for deep-sky observing lists, reports, and articles. The site inspired me to further this hobby as a teenager almost 15 years ago, and it remains a resource I continue to turn to for observing projects. Over the past several months, a small core team has been working on updating and improving the long-standing website, and we're excited to share our rebooted website. Here are some of the new features:
- A more consistent design across the pages
- Improved searchability and navigation to help find content on the site more easily
- Restored some missing content, alongside a lot of new additions
- Dark theme designed for use in the field with a red filter (lightbulb icon on the top right)
- Deep-sky object tagging, which has enabled us to index objects featured on the site by season and constellation, show image previews from SIMBAD as well as provide a way to "takeout" a CSV table of objects mentioned in a page (look for the table download icon on the bottom right of the browser window on some pages)
(The tagging features aren't perfect and probably never will be, as a lot of the tagging has been done automatically, but they should work well in most cases!)
If you haven't visited the site in a while, I encourage you to take a look. Especially check out some of our new and restored content:
- Jay's SNR Challenge, originally posted on his blog and the discussed on CN, is now also on ADS.
- Steve Gottlieb's challenge list for the summer (Golden State Star Party)
- Off the Deep End, Steve Gottlieb's 10 challenging projects
- Mark McCarthy's night vision tour of Sivan Nebulae and Spica Nebula
and more. The homepage features a table of new content.
DeepSkyForum regulars will also love our constellation-wise OOTW index, which has every OOTW until a recent date sorted by constellation. It is periodically refreshed by me running a Python script at my end which pulls in data from this Google Sheets which syncs from Wouter's OOTW Google Sheet that he keeps updated. The RA/Dec is retrieved from SIMBAD and we use that to compute the constellation. The OOTW index is on this page (or simply click DSF OOTW on the navigation header bar).
Next up, a new mailing list for visual deep-sky observers:
To complement the static content on the ADS website, we've launched an Adventures in Deep Space mailing list designed for visual deep-sky observers. This is a dedicated space to share observing reports, ask questions, discuss the content on the ADS site and propose new content, discuss visual astronomy techniques and gear, and connect with others who share your passion for visual deep-sky observing. Whether you're a beginner seeking advice or an experienced observer looking to share your knowledge, the ADS mailing list provides a friendly and resourceful community. To learn more about the mailing list, including its purpose and guidelines, please see this page.
Contributions:
Lastly, the vision for ADS is to create a hub for high-quality observing content. If you have an observing project, report, or list that fits with the site's themes, we'd love to consider adding it – please raise a proposal on the mailing list. Unlike professional publications, ADS is entirely volunteer-run and flexible—we don’t have page limits, polished formats, or editors. This is an experiment for us too, so please bear with us as we learn what sort of content works and what sort of content does not, but I've written some very basic guidelines under the observing reports as well as the articles headings over here.
I would also like to invite fellow software / web developers who are also deep-sky observers to contribute directly to our site. We are hosted courtesy of GitHub pages off of a public repo on GitHub. Anyone can submit a merge request to improve a feature or add an article. We have a mix of static HTML content and Markdown that's rendered through Jekyll. Markdown is the preferred way of adding new content as it automatically pulls in our common JavaScript and CSS. DM me if you need help getting started for now, if our ideas get traction I'll be happy to write documentation.
Wishing you clear skies and happy DSO hunting!
– Akarsh
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