UFO@home

Five pages

UFO@home documentation

How to create an observation, what its file holds, how to share or embed it, and where its data comes from. Arranged by the question being asked: take the one that is yours.

Create an observation

In the editor, or by writing the file yourself. Both produce the same thing: one JSON file that is yours.

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Share an observation

A link to send, or two lines of HTML on your own page. Both with a working example you can try and copy.

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Sources and choices

Where each piece of data comes from, when it is read, where it is served from, and why that source over another.

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Technical#

The components

Four standard elements, one page each: which one you want, what it draws, and everything it answers to.

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The sighting file

What that file holds, field by field: the observation, the observers, what was seen, the weather. With a whole example.

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Getting the sources#

To debug a behaviour, change something, or take this code and make it your own.

git clone https://github.com/RR0/UfoAtHome.git
npm install
npm run dev          # local demo, Vite dev server
npm test             # vitest
npm run build:all    # the three embed bundles

The catalogues are generated, not committed by hand: npm run build:stars (HYG), npm run build:comets (JPL Horizons), npm run build:novae (AAVSO light curves and the historical supernovae) and npm run build:satellites (CelesTrak's SATCAT) each rebuild theirs from its public source, so the data is reproducible as well as readable. npm run build:tle reduces a local copy of Laurent Chabin's orbital element archive (ufowaves.org) to the weekly files served under /tle/.

These pages are the reference. The README says what contributing takes: installing, rebuilding the data, testing, debugging, releasing; the reasoning behind each choice is in the code comments. Everything is MIT — see the FAQ for what that lets you do.