Stellarium 1.0 | Hacker News Reader

Stellarium 1.0

stellarium.org

472 pointsbscphil54 comments

Funny I should see this on the front page of HN the day before I finish my Stellarium port for Nintendo Switch [1]. Unfortunately a lot of the UI code in the 1.0 release made it harder to port so I'm currently basing the Switch version on the 0.xy tags, but it's still a great accomplishment for the Stellarium team!

1: Unless I get approval from Nintendo AND Noctua you will need an RCMed Switch with Atmosphere to run it.

Do you have a link to the nsp file?

Why wouldn't Noctua give their approval ? Why would they need to ? If they do, why would they be the only one who need to ? There does not seem to be a CLA for Stellarium.

Now Nintendo has been very conservative with regards to what they accept, but it would be very interesting to try…

Have been using it years for astrophotography planning.

I've never realized it was 0.x, as I haven't encountered a single bug with Stellarium in my lifetime either on desktop or on iOS.

Great to see it promoted to 1.0 (though I think its more of a symbolic thing)!

Lovely software, free and open source. Recommend to anyone who might want to explore astronomy.

Some projects use 0.x to indicate that there are features they want that they haven't written yet, as opposed to being an indication of stability.

> Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.

In case someone was wondering.

It's pretty cool that they have a web client too

https://stellarium-web.org/

I'm surprised at how much stuff there are above me if not for all the light polution

>I'm surprised at how much stuff there are above me

I mean, it is the... entire visible universe. More than 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Maybe 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe. If you could see into infrared, you could see stuff 34 billion light years away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEERS-93316

Our forebearers had a totally different experience when viewing the night sky to be sure

When I enter my correct location into the web interface, it thinks the sun has just set. It's actually the middle of the day here.

I've tried slight variations of my current location in case it was just getting mixed up with other similarly named places elsewhere in the world. No luck.

OTOH I already have the Android version on my phone and that has always worked just fine.

Strange...

Maybe UTC vs. local time?

This seems like a reasonable choice though (same happens to me), they show you tonight's sky ... otherwise during the day they'd always show a star map with no stars.

What would you want them to show during the day, on a star mapping website?

At risk of sounding inane, the stars are still in the sky in the daytime. A star map showing what you would see during a solar eclipse is not an unreasonable choice either.

It's not stupid to show the stars over head right now, but the utility of showing stars as they appear next time you'll be able to see them seems clearly greater.

You can switch to current time (clock icon, then clock with arrow icon) and turn off the atmosphere (cloud icon) to see what's above you during daytime.

The android app does the same for me, it shows a message with something like "it's daytime in X, fast forward time" and moves to the evening.

For reference, the light pollution map .. and comparing Europe [1] with my backyard [2]

[1] https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=3.78&lat=36.9075&lo...

[2] https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=7.81&lat=-24.5749&l...

Now, if only we can rid ourselves of those bloody streaks from low orbit constellation satellites.

Wow, when did they add so many delightful high-resolution photos?

Try zooming into the Moon, Mars, Saturn, or the Horsehead Nebula on a big monitor. It's gorgeous.

I'm in the Southern Hemisphere and even in my nearest "large" city, you can still see the Milky Way on a clear night. Not in all its glory, mind, but you can see it, and Crux Australis, such a definitive Southern Hemisphere constellation that it appears on five national flags. Although it can be hard to see Epsilon Crucis in a city, as it's a bit dimmer than the four main stars.

But then I travelled to far more densely populated Northern Hemisphere countries, and wow, I see what light pollution is, I really wanted to see Orion right side up, but wasn't able to get far enough away from populated areas when the sky was clear.

Another benefit of living on a sparsely populated island I guess, not sure if it offsets all of the downsides (island "tax" is real, small economy makes it hard to challenge incumbents who dominate a market, we get very few concerts from the top bands, often left off maps), but it did make appreciate what we have in terms of the night sky.

I'm a real big fan of dark sky reserves, it's a fantastic idea. [0]

[0]: https://www.darksky.org/our-work/conservation/idsp/reserves/

I'm from England, where we don't see many of the stars and when we were university students (over a decade ago now), my wife and I were in Switzerland, up a "hill" near Caux Palace; it was the first and only time I've seen the milky way and the only time I'd ever seen the night sky that way; without light pollution.

I hope to do it again, somewhere, some day because it's an incredible experiencev to just lie on the grass in complete darkness like I've never known at home and let you eyes adjust to just show full the night sky is.

Best plan to do it soon. The view will soon be littered with satellites.

https://earthsky.org/space/satellites-versus-stars-night-sky...

>Satellites shine by reflecting the sun’s light. For this reason, they’re usually only visible during the beginning of night and as morning approaches, when the sun’s rays can still reach them high above Earth. But at latitudes such as 50 degrees north and south, locals will see satellites all night long near the summer solstice, and near sunrise and sunset on the equinoxes.

The sky will be clean during winter, once you get an hour away from sunset.

It depends very much on where you are in England. If you want to find the spots next to you where you can see the Milky Way, here is a project that maps the light polution in England: https://landuse.co.uk/portfolio-items/night-blight/

Mid-Wales and Northumberland tie in with my own limited experience. Also

https://www.nationalparks.uk/dark-skies/

Highlands of Scotland a good bet as well.

https://gostargazing.co.uk/regions/country/scotland/highland...

There are shades of sky darkness. Estimating the limiting magnitude you can see on a given night is a fun thing to do...

https://nineplanets.org/estimating-limiting-magnitude/

There's also the Dark Sky project, https://www.darksky.org/.

Thanks. I see the festival is at a time of year I'd be too cold to hang out outdoors, do any of these places have purpose built shelters with clean/clear covers so you can be warm but see the sky?

I've almost always lived in cities unfortunately in this case, just left London for another city.

In the game Elite Dangerous, the galaxy contains 400 billion stars modeled by a Stellar Forge program. Since it’s launch about 7 years ago, less than 0.5% has been discovered, despite thousands of ships “in the black”.

They had the same problem with Elite Frontier, back in the days :)

That was impressive for a game that fit on a single floppy disk. Well, there was a second floppy disk, but it only contained the midi version of the music, never quite understood what for.

The web version is a bit of a different project. Make sure to try the desktop version!

On Polinesia island, in the night it is incredible! Give it a try if you can

I was hoping it would be this, but I was steeling myself in case it was just another nosql web3 gitops thing.

As a telescope amateur, Stellarium is one of my favorite learning tools. Having used this happily for at least 15 years, I had no idea this amazing software wasn't at version 1 yet.

Abandoning 0ver after only 20 years. I guess it's never to late to drop down to 0.9.9

https://0ver.org/

Nice to see projects like this reach their 1.0 milestone, even if the quality has already been there for quite a while.

Interested in the history of astronomy ... starting at the beginning? Excellent detailed podcast (monthly) that names all the names and expertly goes into details: https://songofurania.com/

Stellarium is such a great piece of software. Glad they are considering it stable now.

I’ve tried this with a low cost projector. I’m wondering if anyone experienced this with a better quality one?

I know of at least one planetarium that uses this software and the scripting interface for presentations. Nerdland festival had a dark tent with a projector that fills half a sphere this year with iirc a guide to star signs. Quality wasn't fantastic but for a sunny day and the limited budgets these places always have, it was quite acceptable.

I'm sure someone will explain how "not" can mean "is" in software policy-ease but it is still disappointing to read "Data Not Collected" (on the iOS store) when, in actual fact, data is collected, and shared. https://www.stellarium-labs.com/privacy-policy-for-stellariu...

For what it's worth, the app is a different (and closed source) project, even though there is significant developer overlap. I think if you reported this to them, they would probably be responsive, however.

Thank you. I have reported it to them, several weeks ago, and have yet to receive a response. I used the app and website contact emails and forms. Nothing.

At the moment from Eastern Time Zone, Mars, Aldebaran and Betelgeuse form a red right triangle in the eastern sky. I believe Mars will pass between Aldebaran and Pleiades in a week or so, forming a straight line with those two red stars as it passes, but I think the right triangle is more impressive. I haven't seen this announced in media. A month ago, Mars' transit close to Pleiades was announced, however.

I would love to receive a newsfeed of your astronomy observations, what to look for in the night sky.

Here[1] you go. I whipped this up last night for my brother and a friend. I just happened to be up late, only know about 4 constellations, and maybe half a dozen stars, saw Mars, distinctively bright red last night, and realized that two other red stars were nearby. Including Mars, there's only about 4 red stars that appear red that can be seen with the naked eye, the other being Antares (which at the time was well below the horizon). This will appear slightly different and the triangle slightly more oblique tonight as Mars continues (mostly due to Earth's changed position) along the ecliptic.

[1] https://i.ibb.co/N6NM9vx/2-ACAB9-C6-6-CEF-49-F2-86-F8-AE5474...

Ooh, thank you for the illustration. I was able to find the area on Stellarium Web. From where I am, it will be visible in the Eastern sky from around midnight, every night for a while as it gradually moves up. Cool! I'll keep an eye out. :)

This used to be the first application I’d install on a fresh Ubuntu setup. I don’t know why but it was just beautiful and I loved to see what stars were visible from my location. I wish they had a mobile version.

They do! https://www.stellarium-labs.com/stellarium-mobile-plus/

Great news, thanks to all the maintainers!

I wish someone with the right expertise could modernize Celestia[1] like that.

[1] https://celestia.space

A "1.0" release after more than 20 years... is remarkable.

Between Stellarium and Space Engine, you are in for a treat. Find an object in the sky with the former, and then visit it with the latter.

Congrats to the team on this milestone!!

Sure wish we could get this on F-Droid

Did they fix the lack of XDG base directory support in the Linux version?

I was thinking this might be a Stellaris (game) open source clone.

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