VStar Software Development

David has now fixed the up/down panning problem, corrected a bug associated with selecting an observation, and released another version of VStar for you to test:

http://www.aavso.org/files/vstar/test_version/vstar.jnlp

If you have any time to check it out, we would greatly appreciate it since we would like to do a more formal release later today or early tomorrow (depending on your time zone!)

Thanks!
SaraRead more

Hi all

Thanks Sara, for deploying version 2.10 for testing.

I realise it's getting towards the end of the year, but a couple of days of any testing you can manage would be appreciated so we can give AAVSO a Christmas gift. :)

I have written a Testing VStar document that I hope will help guide everyone regarding how to approach the testing activity.

It's attached to this post.

You can always get the latest version here:

http://vstar.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/vstar/trunk/doc/plan/

Please feel free to ask questions and make suggestions re: this document. As you will see when you read it, there is plenty of scope for you to contribute to it.

Regards,

DavidRead more

Hi all

Something I will say more about in the near future is that I think the Citizen Sky VStar team can play an important role in acting as a test staging area for VStar releases to AAVSO members.

As Sara has mentioned, VStar is getting a higher level of visibility within AAVSO and is downloadable here:

  http://www.aavso.org/vstar-overview

What I'm proposing is that when a new version of VStar is released here, it should undergo a period of testing by us before being released to AAVSO members, in order to provide a higher quality release to a wider audience.

This might mean that if too many problems are found with a particular release here on Citizen Sky, that release might not be propagated to AAVSO.Read more

VStar was on the road again! This time it was at the AAVSO Annual Meeting held in Woburn Massachusetts on October 29th - 30th. I gave a demo on VStar, David joined us by Skype, and Doug Welch described how he and David worked together to create a plug-in which makes it possible to load SuperWASP data. It was great to seeRead more

The only change here is the addition of Nico's beautiful new icons! Thank you Nico and everyone who helped pick these. They look great and came just in time for my talk tomorrow at the AAVSO Annual meeting.

Another great release of VStar - thank you David! The big news about this release is that logging on is now only required for reporting discrepant observations to the AAVSO and for observer code retrieval when the dataset has been loaded from the AAVSO International Database. This should make it easier for us to share this wonderful program with our friends from the AAVSO and further afield who are not yet part of Citizen Sky (but might be intrigued by it). It also makes your life easier... See the ChangeLog for more.

I wanted to say hello to everyone, as I'm a new member of the team and a new observer for thanks to Citizen Sky and the AAVSO for a year now. When Aaron put up his blog post talking about the VStar team and how David had said there was a need for documentation writers. I thought to myself, "heck, I think I can do that" and requested to join the team. Then I thought once again to myself, "what did I get myself into"?!

I'm interested in learning about data analysis myself and the 5-star tutorial is a great start in learning how to use VStar but there are still things unanswered because it is a deep subject. Having talked with David about this, he suggested I post here in the team area to see if anyone else would be interested in helping out with documentation. Read more

Hi all

Doug Welch recently suggested that a worthy observation source plug-in for VStar would be SuperWASP, a FITS file format.

I wrote an initial cut of the plug-in several days ago and Doug gave lots of useful feedback, so it's been through a few more iterations.

Go here to find out more about SuperWASP:

* http://www.wasp.le.ac.uk/public/index.php
* http://www.wasp.le.ac.uk/public/lc/index.php

I might leave it up to Doug to say more about SuperWASP if he wants to.

You can view the source code for this plug-in here:

http://vstar.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/vstar/trunk/plugin/src/org/aavso...

The plug-in development document will tell you how to turn it into a jar file that can be moved into the VStar plug-ins directory:

http://vstar.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/vstar/trunk/plugin/doc/

The built jar file can be made available for any of the plug-ins under:Read more

Thanks to the ongoing outstanding efforts of our fearless leader, David Benn, there is now a new version of VStar available for download. This version features additional plug-in capability and lots more documentation on that and other things. Also, if you see a discrepant observation and would like to let someone at the AAVSO know about it, you simply need to click on that observation, click the checkbox labelled "Discrepant?" in the observation details window, and send it on.

The easy-to-read documentation for how to create a plug-in can be found here: http://www.aavso.org/data/software/vstar/doc/vstar_plugin_dev.pdf

David has also done extensive JavaDocs for VStar, which you can get here:
http://www.aavso.org/data/software/vstar/doc/vstar_docs/Read more