There was a comment recently basically saying that it “used to be great but is not supported as the last update was 2009″, which is quite far from the truth; as anyone who contacts me with a problem/question that I can replicate or help with can attest to. The long times between updates with the cropper are purely because the script is stable (thanks in no small part to building on top of stable & well maintained libraries) and continues to work for people who download it and I haven’t had reports of any issues that would require a new general release.

However I have received information from a few people noting that they were having some issues in IE9. Not having that at hand to test I could only go on the few 3rd party reports I had, but now I’ve managed to test in IE9 and have ensured all the examples work. This only required updating to the latest versions of prototype & script.aculo.us and no other changes.

So the 1.2.2 release contains no new code, only updated examples & the IE9 support notice (that you’ll probably need the latest versions of the libs for it to work). This post is more for the “I/its not dead” message.

It’s something I’ve wanted for a while, but never desperately enough that I’ve done any serious research or examining of the options, or even looked in a telescope shop. However my girlfriend on the other hand must have done quite a bit of research as the telescope she got me for my birthday is not a cheap entry level small telescope, it’s actually quite a large and ‘proper’ telescope (with all sorts of stuff on the mount that I have no idea what it does at the moment) and it’s amazing.

The other night I managed to take some fairly good pictures of the moon (see end of post) considering I took them by just pointing my point and shoot digital camera down the eye-piece (not the best way to take pictures with a telescope – something I’m trying to rectify).

But tonight I managed to find Jupiter (which was actually quite easy with Stellarium on board) and got a good enough view to be able to distinguish the different coloured bands on Jupiter itself and could cleary identify all 4 of its moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto), it looked exactly like this screenshot taken from Stellarium (except without the name tags, and the moons aren’t as big – that’s Stellarium pointing them out to you):

I’ve never even identified where Jupiter was in the sky before tonight, never mind seen it so clearly in real life and it was fantastic – I must have spent the best part of an hour tracking it and watching it.

So take this as a warning that if I get a bit more into this astrophotography lark that I may be posting more pictures, if it ends up being silly I’ll separate them out to a different RSS feed though.

Here are my pictures of the moon from Wednesday 11th June 2008:

1. Setup a Google code project to track the issues (and allow reporting of issues) and to hold the documentation (which I’ve started off with some FAQs).
2. Setup a Google group for discussion of the project, this will allow new and current users to get help and find answers to previously asked questions etc. in a much better way than having things added to the comments (as I found myself continuously answering the same questions).

I hope any future questions/improvement ideas/bugs/feature requests etc. come through via the group or the issues list on the Google code project.

I hope this helps everyone a little bit and I hope to grow the FAQs and add other documentation over the coming days and weeks. I would also like you to get in touch (via the group of course) if you have already made a backend server-side implementation that works with the cropper as I want to list those in the FAQ – I have seen a few mentioned in the comments on the code page and will go through those when I get chance.

Oh and if you’re interested in a little piece of trivia; 999 people have bookmarked the Cropper code page on del.icio.us so far.

It’s great to see people stand up against this, but again it’s such a shame that people have to fight the RIAA in this manner. Surely it would be better all-round to embrace the many great potentials that the web as a distribution channel presents?

Link from Boing Boing.