Share Your Sky!™

It's fast, safe and easy to do. No writing of web pages or scripts needed. No web server installation and configuration needed. Start ACP up and you're on the web safely! Friends who live in the city, fellow astronomy club members, and students from your community or around the world can use your observatory to see the wonders of space and make scientific observations.

We know most of you don't want to provide public services or sell time. That's not (necessarily) what ShareYourSky is about! It's about sharing your observatory with others without needing to train them on your equipment and software.

Introduction

ACP includes optional built-in web and FTP servers and a set of pre-written web pages. If your computer is connected to the internet, then as soon as you enable ACP's web and FTP servers your observatory becomes visible on the internet. Hackers cannot break into your computer! All web requests are protected by username/password, and ACP's servers further restrict access to only certain directories on your hard disk. The supplied web pages allow you to support multiple remote users, each of whom has their own areas for observing plans, run logs and images. There is a shared area where your users can upload any type of file, and others may download these files. Also there is an area from which your users can download, but into which only you (the operator of the observatory) can place files for downloading. The FTP server allows bulk downloading of files such as multiple images from a run, and managing files and folders at the observatory.

ACP is the web server and the FTP server. No other computer or server programs are needed. This does not use Microsoft's IIS, Apache, or any other web server. You'll find ACP's web and FTP services extremely easy to use and manage.

It's easy for people to use your observatory's web pages without training from you! Most content items have help buttons that will reveal useful information.

Getting Started With the Web and FTP Servers

If you're internet-savvy and itching to get started, click here. However, I recommend that you take a few minutes to read through the rest of this page. It will probably save you headaches and time.

Browser Settings

There are two things that will help your browser users get the best experience from ACP. They must have cookies and JavaScript enabled, and Microsoft Internet Explorer users should have "friendly HTTP error messages" turned off. Both of these settings are accessible from the Internet Settings property sheet of Internet Explorer. Cookie usage control varies in other browsers. Cookies are required by ACP to maintain session state. This is also true of any other web sites that use Microsoft Active Server Pages (a huge number of internet sites use ASP), so ACP is not "special" in this regard. The web content is heavily dependent on browser-side JavaScript; it uses the modern AJAX, JSON, JQuery, and DHTML technologies that have become the norm for web sites. Again, ACP is not "special" in this regard.

Connectivity

Because ACP's web and FTP servers are integrated with ACP itself, they are extremely easy to set up. However, in order for people on the internet to be able to reach your computer running ACP, you need to provide them with its web site name or IP address. You can dial into the internet from the ACP computer, at which point people can reach ACP's web server and use your observatory. This is completely practical, but of course a cable modem or DSL connection is better because images can be downloaded by your internet users more quickly. This is not the place for an in-depth treatment of home networking issues, but we'll try to hit the high points.

Dynamic IP addresses

When you are connected to the internet, your computer has an IP address. While a few internet providers assign permanent static IP addresses when you sign up, most assign you an IP address each time you connect. This dynamic address can be different every time you connect. Residential class internet services (dial-up, DSL, cable) usually provide dynamic addresses.

This presents a challenge because your users expect your observatory to have a www.xxx.com name. Traditionally this has been impossible with dynamic addresses. If you do have a dynamic address, in order to have a domain name for your observatory you need to use one of the dynamic domain name services (DDNS) available. We have set up our my-sky.com domain with a DDNS provider such that you can get DDNS service from us at no cost to you!

The my-sky.com Domain

As a service to our Share Your Sky! customers, we have set up the domain my-sky.com for your use at no charge. This means you can have your own domain name like RedMountain.my-sky.com, where you get to choose the first part of the domain name. Much better than trying to keep up with a changing IP address and giving IP addresses to your Share Your Sky! users. In Step 5: Registering an Internet Name, we'll walk you through installing the DDNS software and registering your host name in our my-sky.com domain.

Using IP Addresses

Without DDNS, in order for your web users to reach your observatory web site they must know ACP's public IP address. Your web users must use the public IP address of your running ACP when typing in the address of your observatory web site. It looks something like this

http://201.129.42.66/

where 201.129.42.66 is the IP address of your ACP computer or the public IP address of your router (see below). Needless to say, if your public IP address is static, you can give it to your users once and they can access your observatory using that URL thereafter, even bookmarking it for easy reference. If your internet provider assigns different public IP addressed (technically called DHCP), then whenever one of your users wants to access the observatory, they'll have to contact you to get the public IP address du jour. What is that public IP address? If you use a router (and everyone does these days), the address your net users need is the public address for the router. See the next section. This will be explained in much more detail in later pages. All in all, the My-Sky.com approach is much better for all concerned!

Routers

With virtually all home and small office internet services (fiber, cable, DSL), you will have a router which provides a firewall between your internal network and the outside public network. Routers create a sort of "one way" internet connection; you can reach out to other sites, but others cannot reach in to you. Thus, your ACP-equipped observatory running behind a firewall will be invisible to rest of the internet.

There is hope, though. Most routers provide "port forwarding" or "DMZ" capabilities. Either of these features can make one of your inside computers appear to have the public (and possibly dynamic) IP address of your router. To make this work you have to set it up so that your ACP-equipped computer is exposed to the internet, then determine the IP address of your router and give that to your remote users. The latter is unnecessary if you use DDNS; it handles the IP changes and updating the domain name automatically.

Log Files

ACP produces a server log and a usage log. After you get things going, be sure to check out the Server Logging help page for info on these useful logs.