Seven pages

UFO@home documentation

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

Understanding#

What is a UFO case?

What a case gathers, the three kinds of event it holds (observations, interpretations, interviews) and how they can be linked.

Observations

What an observation is, then what its file holds, field by field. With a whole example.

Interviews

What an interview of a case holds: the event, its transcript, passages taken out, who approved it, links to the observation, and importing a transcript from another format.

Doing#

Create an observation

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

Create an interpretation

In the case editor, or in the case file: an alternative explanation of what was seen, as an observation of its own.

Create an interview

In the case editor, or in the files: who took part, how, and the transcript if you have one.

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

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.