Forums / Welcome to Citizen Sky / Project Announcements / VStar data visualization tool
VStar data visualization tool
An easy-to-use variable star data analysis tool called VStar is being developed as part of the Citizen Sky project. This is a free and open source computer program that can be used to plot observations and visualize changes in the brightness of a star. Below is a sample image generated by an early version of VStar showing epsilon Aurigae during the last eclipse.
David Benn has done a great deal of work creating the VStar software. He gave a presentation about the current status and the plans for the future at the workshop in Chicago. During the next few days and weeks we will post detailed instructions on how to obtain and use it. Even though it is a work in progress, it would be helpful at this stage to hear some feedback from people who have tried it. We will use the forums here to provide updates, answer questions and discuss the software. For now, you can visit the project website to learn more about VStar.
These are for everyone to vote for.
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| AboutPage.jpg | 274.56 KB |
| AboutPage1.5.jpg | 174.22 KB |
| AboutPage1.jpg | 244.92 KB |
| AboutPage2.5.jpg | 160.38 KB |
| AboutPage2.jpg | 198.64 KB |
| AboutPage3.5.jpg | 192.73 KB |
| AboutPage3.jpg | 176.61 KB |
Wow, thanks for posting a variety of mock ups. These look great! I'm leaning toward 3.5 as my favorite. It might be kind of cool to see some data points on top of the image that show a plot of a variable. Maybe something like these links, with just the data (no text or graph lines) subtle on top of the graphics that you created. Just an idea, the current versions look amazing.http://www.aavso.org/images/terrellfig2.gifhttp://www.aavso.org/images/1298lc.gif-mikeu
Wow, thanks for posting a variety of mock ups. These look great! I'm leaning toward 3.5 as my favorite. It might be kind of cool to see some data points on top of the image that show a plot of a variable. Maybe something like these links, with just the data (no text or graph lines) subtle on top of the graphics that you created. Just an idea, the current versions look amazing.http://www.aavso.org/images/terrellfig2.gifhttp://www.aavso.org/images/1298lc.gif-mikeu
I'll keep in mind the "waves" of points. The only issue I see with adding more to an already busy illustration is making it overwhelmingly distracting. What I could do is somehow incorporate cool looking plotted data points as divisions in text —wingdings, borders.
Fantastic stuff Nico! I like 3.5 too but I think 3 is my favourite.I also like Mike's suggestion of superimposing a plot.Regards,David
3.5 is by far my favorite
I'd like to say thanks to Mike for his post, and for his testing and encouragement efforts up to this point. Irecentlywrote this blog entry about CitizenSky and VStar (also linked to the Media Room page): http://dbenn.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/citizensky-workshop-and-vstar-soft... which describes how to download VStar from SourceForge. Let us know if you have any problems with this. Regards, David