Share an observation

1. A link to ufoathome's player#

The simplest of the two, and the only one that needs nothing at all of the place you are sending it to. Anybody who follows it sees the observation played in the real sky of the date and place it states, in their own language.

Good for an email, a message, a comment, a forum that allows nothing but text — anywhere you can put a URL. The field above starts on one of this site's own recordings so the button does something; the address you put there is your own, on your own host, and this site never needs a copy of it.

2. On your own page#

Two lines of HTML put the reconstruction itself in your page, the way a video goes in a page. No framework, and nothing for your site to build.

The result:

That is a live element, not a picture — the same one those two lines would give you. Which of the four components to use instead, and everything they can be told, is on the components page.

What a recording needs to be shareable#

One thing: a public address. Anywhere a browser can fetch it from — a static site, a file host, a repository's pages. A file on your own disk has no URL anybody else can follow, and that is the only real requirement.

If the address is public, opens fine in your own browser, and the player still says it could not be read, the cause is almost always the same one: the server is not telling browsers that other sites may read the file. The remedy is one response header, Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, on the JSON. Most static hosts — GitHub Pages, Netlify, S3 — either send it already or let you add it in a line of configuration; if the server is not yours, that is the single thing to ask its administrator for. The player and the editor both say so when they detect it, so you should not have to guess.

Nowhere to put it yet? The player also takes a recording pasted straight in, which is enough to check one before publishing it — though a pasted one cannot, of course, be shared by link.

Don't have a recording at all? Make one.