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Stellarium

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258 pointsthrowoutway31 comments

The biggest improvement for my stellarium usage was creating my own landscape¹, as having a quick way to see whether that early morning partial eclipse is behind those trees is really useful. Also, kinda super fun to sit in your office chair spinning around your own garden.

I actually created a bunch of landscapes for places that I have reasonable access to, so that I can choose an appropriate place for observations without having to resort to guesswork.

I'll note that you can create usable versions with the panorama function on a cheap phone and gimp.

¹ http://stellarium.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Customising...

It just took me 15 minutes to make a panorama for kstars (a very similar program, I assume the same image would work in both) using an android phone and the google 'street view' app.

The street view app is intended for making panoramas for submission to google maps... but you can just not submit the images, and they get stored locally in the photos folder. After that you just load it in gimp to erase the sky and save the result as an image with an alpha channel.

The hardest part was aligning the image to make north agree exactly -- but unless you're going to use the image to map out visibility for astrophotography you don't have to get it exactly right.

Thanks for sharing. I've been using stellarium pretty much exclusively and never heard of kstars.

Will definitely give it a try.

Kstars has phenomenal astrophotography integration (as in, support for taking photographs, both can display photographs from network sourced databases), outside of that I think stellarium gives a more slick experience-- closer to a planetarium show and a little less of a technical tool.

Thank you so much for this!

On several occasions I planned my observations in stellarium and got excited about some object finally getting into view only to discover my dobsonian is actually too low or the tree at the back would obstruct the view at the worst possible time.

It is also incredibly useful when considering a property. Sketching out the nearby structures and trees as a Stellarium landscape is a great way to figure out what the lighting conditions are during other times of the year, especially at high latitudes where these things vary tremendously. I keep getting surprised by how off my hunch for June lighting conditions is in December, and Stellarium takes the guesswork out of it.

Woah, this sounds incredibly useful. Are there any blog posts / wiki pages / videos that you used as a reference when doing this? I'm hoping to put a garden in my backyard this month, but I'm not sure about the location.

I've been meaning to hack together some scripts to automate the whole process, with an accompanying writeup, but I've been lazy. Your comment made me want to get this done though, thanks :-)

Short summary: I go see the property, take properly geolocated photos in several important parts of it, trying to keep the camera level and pointed in known directions (or verift that the compass is calibrated), and trying to keep easily visible landmarks and buildings in view. Then I go to my country's mapping authority website and find the property and the same landmarks and buildings, and simply re-create them as super-crude rectangles in a Stellarium landscape. I open the landscape, set the location, and then check out where the sun is in the sky at several times per year.

What I wanna automate is importing a digital elevation model (many countries offer this under a liberal license), and perhaps stitching the aforementioned photos into the Stellarium landscape (although I bet this provides little actual value).

Some previouslies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20901358 2019, 56 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19513222 2019, 33 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17906113 2018, 48 comment

The last one is about the web port with some interesting comments from one of the developers about how they did a C rewrite in order to port it to the web.

It's scriptable! I took far too many hours of staring and pondering to come up with a set of scripts for new astronomers to get a sense of the size and duration of the solar system's main planets and moon orbits:

https://github.com/jasonincanada/stellarium-scripts

This is great. I am an amateur astrophotographer, just as a hobby.

When I'm planning for shooting a specific celestial body I can easily fast forward to night and see when and how long is the most suitable way to plan a shot (shooting deep space objects take total of many hours of exposures, "locked" to the same point in space using a tracker). Also know when moon and sun will rise/set which is crucial as even a tiny amount of sunlight or moonlight ruins the already-super-faint data.

Also has the mobile app, which is equally useful. Definitely recommended if you're getting into astrophotography, or just to see how time and Earth's rotation affects what is seen in the sky.

can you comment on your setup a bit?

I've been using cartes du ciel over remote desktop to my laptop with serial connections to the telescope. it's not super performant (neither is stellarium). I'm thinking about using the ascom over tcp bits that these clients like to implement.

Where I live, light pollution is a huge obstacle for observing the skies, plus it is cloudy very often. Sometimes I feel like it's not even worth looking at the skies.

Stellarium allows me a glimpse of what it would be like without light pollution or clouds. I don't use it very often, but I love it dearly.

Also, if you manage to get a good look at the sky and wonder what is that point of light over there, Stellarium is priceless.

Stellarium is a masterpiece, my childhood memory, and one of the most important softwares for astronomy education that doesn’t charge you anything!

there was an old software that i used back in early 2000-2005. Red shift 3. it was this massive plantery astronomy whatever magic that would do stars and eclipses and recordings or animated eclipses and what not. i wonder if anyone is similar to that in the FOSS software world. i tried stellarium i think its a star map, thats it.i could be wrong but i compare all these current softwares with red shift 3 in my mind and most if not all fall short.

edit:http://archaic.maris.com/content/index520f.html

this looks like the software i was talking about

https://lowendmac.com/2001/astronomy-software-redshift-3-0-f...

it says for MAC but i've used it on my windows 98/2000 back in the day

Sounds sort of like Celestia, but I'm not 100% sure from your description what the program was like.

http://archaic.maris.com/content/index520f.html

640x480 screenshots, wow.

I loved Celestia so much I've been working on rewriting it for the web for some years

http://celestiary.github.io

wow, really slick, I'll have to check out your code, I've been wanting to try out generating sky maps.

Only problem I ran into is rotating on touchscreen quickly got bent out of shape, not rotating the same way as I dragged the screen. Could it be a gimbal lock issue?

Thanks!

Gimbal lock.. yeah, I got it after playing for a bit. Bummer.

Been meaning to try this out: https://github.com/yomotsu/camera-controls. Fun!

Very nice. However, it seems to be showing a nearly-full moon for today (March 6), when in fact the moon is nearly-new.

EDIT: Another issue, if you're interested. When speeding up time, it can be seen that the moon spins far too rapidly. It should be tidally locked to Earth (more or less).

Thanks! Yeah.. it's not quite there.. my orbital elements are all there but i haven't set everything running from the Epoch. I could do some tweaks to make it more realistic, but figure I'll put in a good sprint on it sometime and just do the orbits right.

Similar 'old' software, I really enjoy and it runs as portable (on Windows): home planet

https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/

It's so old it talks about "downloading on dial-up connections", though the hiomepage is up to date (and full of gems)

Question: Is there a possibility in Stellarium to place thyself on for example Pluto/Jupiter, some comet, or some nearby star (inside Milky Way or outside) - and look at the Milky Way center/another random star/area of space + have trajectories drawn when I "pres play on time" engine?

Using those perspectives - with all of the trajectories drawn, alongside with the preset universal/local/celestial coordinates, luminosity, maps... huge time-spans... is - informative for us who want/plan and work on slingshot maneuvers through space&time - it gives a spacial perspective for the game ^_^

Anyone remember "Red Shift 3"?

If (when) WW3 kicks into gear - I will most certainly spin-up a virtual win98 box and revive the 20 years old pleasure engraved in my teeth and synapses. Ah man - even the memory of those explorations and detailed reads on any particular object/area warms my broken heart.

cool story bro

I wrote some scripts that let you tour the solar system on an hourly loop:

https://github.com/jasonincanada/stellarium-scripts

I love using the android version, really smooth and beautiful. Kudos to the devs

It kind of stinks using this over remote desktop because it relies so heavily on opengl.

Have you seen https://stellarium-web.org/?

yea, but i'm using it to control my backyard observatory. it needs local tcp or serial access.

so far this performs better over remote desktop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartes_du_Ciel

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