[OpenLayers-Dev] Introducing myself and doubt of the possibility of using openlayers in non-earth maps

[David Perez-Suarez]

Hello Openlayers developers!!

Let's first introduce myself:  I'm David, an astro-physicist doing research
in Ireland about the Sun (yes, I know, it's, somehow, a contradiction).
Hello to everyone!!

I get to this project looking for exactly what openlayers is able to do.
However, my aim is a bit different of what openlayers is for. So far I've
been looking at all the examples and none show something very similar to
what I want to do.  I would like to heard your opinion before I spend time
doing something that may not be possible to do (or very-very difficult).  I
must say that my knowledge in javascript are very very basics, but I think
that the best way to improve it is diving into a project like this.

So, what do I want to do? I work with solar images obtained at different
"heights" of its atmosphere.  Depending where you look at you can
distinguish different features.  The properties of these features (i.e.
position, area, ...) are very important for a big variety of purposes, one
of the most important is space-weather forecast.  Where I'm working we have
lots of feature detection routines to extract such properties from the
images in quasi real-time.  However, we want to make them accessible to
everyone and allow them to browse between the detections done.

So, in one line, what I want is to adapt openlayers to visualize solar
images (as we would see half-earth projected in a circle) and overlay the
contour of the features.

I would like to know if using these images it would be possible to use a
linear coordinate system (x,y) predefined, and at the same time being able
to overplot a circular grid showing the solar lat-long coordinates.

To understand better what I mean, you can visit our site,
http://www.solarmonitor.org
and also, the result of one of the feature extraction code,
http://solarmonitor.org/smart_disk.php

I know that this will need some code developing as coordinate transformation
and so on,  that's why I write here and not in the user list. I will really
appreciate your comments and suggestions.  If you thing there's an easier
way to do this without using openlayers, so feel free to let me now, though
I'm very enthusiastic about the possibilities that openlayers offers.

Thanks for your time,

David
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