By using a combination of technologies, and some bailing wire, duct tape and elbow grease, I've managed to give my chatbot, Morti, a telescope to share with his visitors.

Ok, ok. Maybe this isn't exactly the best place to post this, but I want to get some testing data from more than a single source, so this post should work just fine.

The URL is for Morti's main page, at http://www.geekcavecreations.com/Morti/?debug (the 'debug' thing is so I can track a few things {NOT PERSONAL STUFF, though!}

A few things, though:

1.) The Google Earth plugin will NOT work on bodies within the solar system, mainly because the Google Earth plugin won't support viewing them.
2.) The telescope searches two different databases; SIMBAD for Google Earth, and APOD for the image search. Neither one is perfect, and both are ~VERY~ intolerant of spelling errors.
3.) The SIMBAD Astronomical DB is pretty comprehensive, with over 17 million commonly accepted names, designations or identifiers for nearly 7 million objects, but there are far, far more objects in the sky than that, so don't blame Morti if the scope can't "find" something.
4.) The APOD image search will return images for a lot of stuff that isn't necessarily a celestial body. Try typing "telescope Apollo 17", and see what comes up.
5.) There is a SIMBAD image search, too, but there are some problems with it (not everything in the DB has an associated image, for one), so I won't be using that any time soon. The APOD image search is sort of weak, but it's better than the old one.

I'll be working on creating a "new image" button or link for the image search, but that's going to have to wait till after the holidays.

I checked it out Dave and gave it a go, it's working in IE 10 if that helps. Yeah I like it very neat idea. 

Yes it's cool - works in Chrome too, once I installed the plugin.   

Thanks, gents. I think I'll "expand" the project into it's own page after the holidays, giving it additional features, such as showing past searches, and a list of identifiers for the object searched. There's also a way, using SIMBAD data, to find the distance to most objects, so I'll try to incorporate that in the the Google Earth plugin, so that it will properly set the range, in addition to the coordinates. It's also possible to set up a tour of the cosmos, giving descriptions of the objects within the tour (as long as I have these descriptions already written, of course). There are a lot of possibilities here.

A few more examples might be good, for non experts like me.  I managed to remember the moon and Betelgeuse but that's about it 

I'll try to put together something like the "gossip" category that saves past searches globally, so that Morti can tell folks what other folks have been searching for. Or, I can do that with the telescope script, and just add a "past searches" div. That would actually be a bit easier.

Might even give folks a chuckle, if someone types in "telescope your mum".

Dough!!! I broke it 

Quotesomething went wrong!
Data = |[object XMLHttpRequest]|

I got it working again after clicking ok within the error pop up box though   

I guess you did not teach him about the ~Asteroid belt~ yet 

I like the feature a lot, a job well done Dave 

Quote from: Freddy on December 11, 2012, 14:37:13 PM
A few more examples might be good, for non experts like me.  I managed to remember the moon and Betelgeuse but that's about it 

Don't forget you can ask our Legion for information about the solar system:
http://www.datahopa.co.uk/forum/page/legion/

I've decided to go ahead and work on the "skeleton" telescope page, just to see what it would look like. It's at http://dmorton.no-ip.info/telescope/ - It's not functional yet, but it gives a good idea of what the finished product may look like.

I'm figuring your still working on it, for I could not and still can't load the page since 12:40 it's now 1:16. you broke it this time

That virus scan that I had run the other night required my taking my dev server offline, so it wasn't available at the time. It' back up now, but it's also now live at http://www.geekcavecreations.com/telescope/ for everyone to enjoy. I'm still tweaking it, but it's fully functional. It needs to be tested in *nix-based browsers, since I haven't got my VM running yet, but it should work ok in them.

Of course, feedback/suggestions are both welcome and encouraged.