Paul Rodman, an amateur astronomer from Seattle decided to take his interests to the next level. He bought a Meade LX200 telescope and discovered he could program a computer to control it. The only problem was he wanted to use his Mac and at that time there were very few Mac astronomy applications available. In particular, there were no applications for planning and executing observing sessions. Paul has a background in computer science and decided he could just build one himself.
The Problem: Gap in the market for solutions used to aid astronomical observation planning.
Paul had worked with other programming tools to compile applications on the Mac, but felt most of them were too time consuming. He was looking for a rapid, cross-platform development environment and after learning about Xojo, Paul was sold.
In just six short months Paul produced an astronomer’s planning app and shared it with other Mac-based astronomers. They were equally pleased and before he knew it, he was getting requests for a Windows version. Since Xojo is cross-platform, he was able to quickly bring this to market. Today AstroPlanner is used by more than 5000 amateur astronomers to facilitate astronomical observation planning, visualization and logging, as well as control of telescopes with computerized go-to mounts or digital setting circle controllers. AstroPlanner helps astronomers figure out what to look for in the sky, when the best time would be, and then helps them do the actual observing by logging observations and controlling their telescopes.
"While experimenting with Xojo I was surprised how easy and fast it was to create a Mac application with a decent user interface," commented Rodman.
"I was blown away when I found that, with a single checkbox, I could compile the exact same code for Windows. I could build a Mac application and then, with minimum effort, compile an equivalent Windows application."
While most users are amateurs, Paul learned that AstroPlanner was being used at the University of Toronto to help astronomers plan observations for the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers are also using the software in the USA and Australia to plan asteroid photometry and astrometry programs, and to automate extragalactic supernova search efforts using robotic telescopes.
In addition to AstroPlanner, Paul has written several support applications using Xojo to handle customer tracking, bug tracking, and construction of FAQs. He’s also working on an application that emulates various types of commercial telescopes, along with an app that will allow his users to share astronomy hardware information via a central database.
Paul determined Xojo was best because of the following critical features:
- Cross-Platform Deployment: Xojo makes it possible to develop software on one platform and deploy on multiple platforms with native-looking results.
- Rapid Application Development: Xojo is a rapid application development environment that gives programmers the power to write, test and ship software four times faster than C++ or Java.
- Automation: With Xojo’s “Build Automation” feature, users can visually drag and drop build steps to execute common actions, like copying files and running IDE scripts, before and/or after an application is built. All of this can be done from within a given project.
The Result: Created with Xojo, AstroPlanner now used by more than 5000 astronomers.
"Xojo offers friendly, readable syntax, but with powerful object-oriented language features and unique, powerful built-in features that are easy to use, added Rodman.
Long time Xojo user and amateur astronomer, Tim Jones, uses AstroPlanner for deciding which objects to highlight for the public crowds at the Saguaro Astronomy Club and Phoenix Astronomical Society's public outreach star parties. By working through things in AstroPlanner before the event, it's much easier to be prepared compared the old method of searching for objects while the line for the telescope gets longer and longer.
