Astronomy Blog

APOD Search

In my last post I mentioned I'd made a search engine for Astronomy Picture of the Day. I've added a few improvements since last week:

• As well as individual words (and negated words), a search can now include phrases by putting them in quotation marks e.g. "hubble space telescope".
• You can view the results in a compact grid view as well as a list view.
• I've added an "Advanced" tab that lets you search by position on the sky (e.g. 05:35:18.9, -05:39:25.7) as well as by type of object using the AVM taxonomy (e.g. interacting galaxies)
• The results are now paged (50 results per page) so that your browser isn't overwhelmed by thousands of images.
• As I have to stretch the tiny thumbnails to the same height, wide-aspect images became very pixelated. In those cases, I replace the image with a higher resolution version after the page loads.
• Searching by word, phrase, position and object type can all be combined to limit the results.
• If there are no results you now get a message telling you that!

That is it for now but if anyone has any suggestions for improvements let me know.