Astronomical society websites often have static images of the night sky that they need to update every month. This can be time consuming and is never very satisfying because the view is usually only valid for one location at one time. To provide a solution we recently launched Virtual Sky - a web-browser-based interactive planetarium that can be embedded in other websites without the need for special browser plugins. Virtual Sky can be customised to change the location, time, add gridlines, show planets, show constellations, make a printer friendly version, and much more.
Today we've released our latest update to the code (version 0.3.4). As well as fixing a few minor bugs, there are now new ways to change the observing location. It was already possible to change the observer's latitude and longitude but to do that you needed to know them. Now you can enter a place name and the appropriate geographic coordinates will be found.
We are making more use of Virtual Sky on the LCOGT website too. The observation pages for Faulkes Telescope North and Faulkes Telescope South now include a virtual view from those sites with the latest observations overlaid on the sky. We hope this will provide some extra context about where each telescope has been looking.
If you have suggestions for features we could add to Virtual Sky, please let us know.