[HN Gopher] Stellarium is a free GPL software which renders real...
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Stellarium is a free GPL software which renders realistic skies in
real time
Author : tosh
Score : 414 points
Date : 2024-01-13 16:12 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fbhabbed wrote:
| There's even a web version linked at https://stellarium.org/
| igor47 wrote:
| I love stellarium on my phone. It even identifies satellites!
| I've seen the ISS with my own eyes! (It looks like a glowing dot)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I always liked trying to find the ISS myself while camping but
| there's so damn many satellites up there now, it's hard to tell
| which is which!
| Kye wrote:
| The ISS will be the really bright one. I _think_ the last
| Iridium satellite that flares was decommissioned a while
| back, but you might see those too.
| petee wrote:
| I do too, its alot of fun identifying random satellites, plus
| the paid version is an easy way to financially support the
| desktop. And the developers are actually responsive, which is
| refreshing.
| dewey wrote:
| I use Sky Guide on my phone and it's still one of these apps
| that make "modern" technology feel amazing, similarly to just
| being able to point Flight Radar at the sky and see where a
| plane is going.
| samstave wrote:
| Does this require the paid FR acct?
| dewey wrote:
| No, I have a paid account to remove ads but the base
| functionality doesn't require it.
| Kye wrote:
| I've probably sold a few copies of this from people asking
| why I was pointing my phone at the sky.
| Kye wrote:
| It's one of the few things left in too-bright places that can
| introduce someone to the wonders of space in a way images and
| video can't. Some neighbors finally stopped and asked why I
| stood at the road looking at the mostly starless sky most
| nights.
|
| "Waiting for the space station." (and other satellites, but
| those are harder to see)
|
| "I didn't know it was still a thing."
|
| It started as a little dot on the horizon, barely visible in
| the hazy light from the city, then built to a blinding light
| above. I heard a "holy fuck" so I guess they were suitably
| wowed.
| UberFly wrote:
| I once saw it go over by chance with a Japanese module
| closely following. It was very cool.
| globular-toast wrote:
| It's such a shame Iridium flares are no longer a thing. The
| ISS is in the sky a bit too long really. I've showed people
| and they thought it was a plane (despite telling them a
| planes lights would flash). A good Iridium flare was
| unmistakable though and quite the arresting sight.
|
| The last one I be tried to look for would have been perfect.
| It was supposed to happen on a friend's wedding night. It
| happened but was thoroughly unimpressive. I found out soon
| after the satellites were in the process of being
| decommissioned and flares were no longer happening as
| predicted. By now they're all gone and we just get boring
| objects like the Starlink satellites.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I make my kids wave at it. There's a manned spaceship flying
| over our heads at 17,000 mile per hour. We see it, we wave.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Something my partner and I noticed during the full lockdown
| of the pandemic was that the lack of aviation made it much
| easier to notice spacecraft.
|
| In a big city with an airport a moving light in the sky is
| almost always a jet at high altitude.
|
| But with nearly zero flights, it was more likely to be a
| satellite or the space station.
| dylan604 wrote:
| all satellites viewed with the naked eye look like a "glowing
| dot". in long exposure images, they look like long single pixel
| streaks which makes them easily different than a meteor which
| flares wider in the middle before narrowing again as well as
| also changing colors.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Just installed it and nonstop upgrade ads, not what I expect
| from a GPL app. Maybe one or two but nagging, no.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Why not? GPL is free as in speech, not as in beer.
|
| All it implies is: you can get the source code, so if you
| don't like the official App Store version you're more than
| welcome to build your own.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Not allowed to install, no. Can't recommend it.
|
| As I said, don't mind here and there... it's helpful. But
| nag me and get replaced.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Its worth mentioning that nobody is doing anybody a favor
| by using their free software. It seems pretty plain that
| the free version is a trial you are expected to uninstall
| or upgrade.
| ugh123 wrote:
| But can I use it to build a better, paid-for, app without
| having to give up my source code because of the GPL thing?
| anjel wrote:
| When the ISS transits the full moon, is way more than a for.
| The solar arrays are easily discerned.
| theossuary wrote:
| Does anyone have any resources for projecting stellarium onto the
| ceiling/walls of a room to mimic the sky above/around? I dug into
| it a bit and it seemed like projecting into a boxy surface could
| be accounted for easily enough. But I couldn't find a projector
| for a decent cost that wasn't too bright. Would be a really fun
| diy project for me, if I could figure out the hardware.
| dharmab wrote:
| Warthog Project built a multi-projector surround display that
| might be of interest:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsleWkgOsak (later upgraded to
| 270 degrees).
|
| HDR Projectors are also a thing now:
| https://youtu.be/iFJsEfWsTd4?t=852
| petee wrote:
| I cant find the link, but I i recently saw a projector project
| where someone used a deconstructed android phone with the
| backlight removed from the screen, and a light/lens combo to
| get >1080p. Though that limits you to Android apps or RDP, it
| might be a starting point to hack your own.
|
| Stellarium does have an android app but its a fraction of the
| desktop app functionally.
| _Microft wrote:
| Maybe it was "DIY Perks"?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfvTjQ9MCwY
| petee wrote:
| Yes it was, didn't realize it had been three years already
| though!
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| It's not stellarium, but I've got a DarkSkys DS1 and bought my
| parents a FX model and they both have far higher fidelity in
| the image displayed due to using chrome disks instead of a
| screen. It looks better than anything I've ever seen at home.
|
| https://dark-skys.com/collections/projectors
| prepend wrote:
| I'm interested that this project, and many other visual projects,
| don't have example images in their readme.
| Ecco wrote:
| Agreed. It's a freaking image generator yet there is zero
| sample picture on their GitHub page... That's terrible :-/
| sorokod wrote:
| stellarium.org link is on the GitHub landing page twice -
| chill.
| prepend wrote:
| I followed that link and didn't see any images there.
|
| I could also google "stellarium project images" but I think
| my point is that I would expect projects to be as explicit
| as possible about "this is what we make."
| slater wrote:
| There's a "view screenshots" link front and center on
| stellarium.org
|
| here ya go:
|
| http://stellarium.org/screenshots.html
| cbsks wrote:
| Maybe your ad blocker is acting up? I see a carousel with
| 5 images and a link to the full screenshots.
| skydhash wrote:
| The project website is at http://stellarium.org/. There is no
| need to have images inside a project repository. Every
| maintainer already knows what it looks like. What next?
| Marketing materials?
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Sorry, but one screenshot would be enough to demonstrate what
| the repository is about.
|
| So many project fail at this.
| tanvach wrote:
| love to see what your project repo looks like as a
| comparison.
| recursive wrote:
| The website has more than one.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| When quickly browsing github projects to see what's worth
| my time I don't always click the website link.
|
| I likely skip over repos with no screenshot much more.
| mihaic wrote:
| What purpose are you browsing projects on github? Genuine
| question, as I've never done this.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| To find active popular open source projects?
|
| How do you do it?
| skydhash wrote:
| Word of mouth, organic exposure. I've only used github
| search only for a few time aside from quickly finding one
| of my repositories.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Typically github readme's are targeted at busy developers
| rather than beginner s as well.
|
| They also include a contributor guide so I can see how
| hackable some project I'm using is.
|
| I also prefer to use projects I wouldn't hate hacking on
| if forced to. So a PHP project has a much higher bar than
| aHaskell project.
|
| Github and other forges easily allow this approach.
| simonklitj wrote:
| I disagree. Users, not just maintainers, discover projects
| through GitHub. In this context, the README effectively
| serves as a secondary project landing page. IMO, for a visual
| project like this, images, or a direct link to images, is a
| must.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Then a link to the website which is a much better medium
| for demonstrating software than README files would be a
| simple fix.
| prepend wrote:
| Then a link to an example image on the web site is much
| better.
|
| The idea is to help people understand the project. Not to
| give them an investigation task. I don't know the
| structure of that web site or if there are even images
| there.
| otterley wrote:
| The first time in your life that you learn that a
| project's code lives on GitHub and its documentation and
| marketing website are someplace else, you'll start
| looking for the website reference in the GitHub README or
| searching for it as a matter of course. It's really not
| that big a deal.
| prepend wrote:
| It's not a big deal. It's just a useful piece of
| documentation.
|
| I'm not heartbroken because of this gap, I'm just
| confused why they wouldn't want to add these docs to help
| users.
| degenerate wrote:
| I imagine some OSS authors don't consider someone visiting the
| GitHub readme before visiting their website. I can't fathom
| thinking like that, but it must have never crossed their mind.
|
| Here's the screenshots: https://stellarium.org/screenshots.html
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarium_(software)#Screensh...
| deadbabe wrote:
| What's more amazing to me is that for open source projects like
| this where anyone can contribute, people would rather complain
| about the lack of a screenshot instead of submitting a pull
| request adding a screenshot to the README.
|
| You could probably become a very prolific contributor just by
| adding a screenshot to every such repo you come across.
| Kharacternyk wrote:
| I imagine a lot of such pull requests wouldn't be merged.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I submitted one, it may never be merged, but at least now I
| can say I tried. And isn't that what open source is about?
| Kharacternyk wrote:
| If it requires little effort, it's fine, but generally
| before working on something one should ask the
| maintainers whether the status quo is deliberate.
| deadbabe wrote:
| They are free to reject the pull request. The worst they
| can say is no.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if it is just a change over time? I expect READMEs to
| be formatted primarily to be opened in the terminal... nice 80
| column plain text files.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is my primary experience with READMEs as well. I feel
| like this is one of those new users not appreciating the
| history and morphing into something they understand with zero
| interest in the old ways
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| The future Star Trek Enterprise's interplanetary navigation
| computer subsystem!
|
| (Version 0.00000001 of it, that is! <g> :-) <g>)
| _joel wrote:
| I don't generally use apps on my phone but this one is a must.
| Kharacternyk wrote:
| I use the mobile version regularly, especially when it's warmer
| outside than it is now, and TIL that it is open source. Now I
| consider purchasing the pro version, as a form of donation.
| brunoqc wrote:
| The pro version is a bit pricey, for an open source app and for
| something most people will only use on occasion. Also an app
| like this doesn't do much so I wonder why limit it by locking-
| away some features.
| jayknight wrote:
| SkySafari is a better app for actually doing astronomy, but
| the pro version is quite expensive, and each major version is
| a new app that you have to pay for again if you want to
| upgrade. I bought it a few versions ago and still use it
| regularly.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I have never managed to get the atmospheric model to reflect what
| was visible at more than one zoom level. I think it's because
| they increase your light gathering power as you zoom in, as if
| you were switching to a bigger telescope to improve your aperture
| limitation, while in reality you usually zoom by changing lenses
| that keep the lowest visible magnitude the same.
| brnt wrote:
| Back in 2006, this is how I did the 'observations' for my
| astronomy 1 homework.
| idatum wrote:
| I've been using XEphem 4.1 on Win11 using WSLg and it works well.
| But I noticed a Windows installation is available of Stellarium
| -- I'll give it a try.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Also worth mentioning: https://celestiaproject.space/
|
| It used to be packaged and readily available in most distros, now
| it is not. I wonder what's that about.
|
| You can zoom out and see the local group and Virgo supercluster.
| coder543 wrote:
| The Celestia project was dormant for nearly a decade. It
| becomes hard to package unmaintained software. I haven't kept
| up with who the new owner is or what they're doing, so there
| could be reasons it hasn't been picked up again by the distros.
|
| Back in the late 2000s, Celestia was certainly an amazing
| experience for me. I see there's a mobile version now, which
| makes me happy. It works pretty well on my iPhone, although the
| UX is not perfect.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I think there is a Flatpak that addresses most of the
| installation grief.
| nanna wrote:
| Stellarium is wonderful. My favourite feature is the ability to
| change sky culture. The Japanese one is so strange and poetic. A
| single band of small constellations that crosses the sky like a
| vertical line of Kanji and includes constellations with names
| like 'emptiness'.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Though it was a bit of a shock in an/the Arabic sky culture to
| find one of their constellations called "Woman chained to a
| post"!
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Does the Greek/western Andromeda constellation shock you
| equally? Because that's what it is as well.
| antognini wrote:
| That whole region of the sky is quite impressive, because
| along with Andromeda chained to the rock, there is Cetus,
| the sea-monster, approaching to devour her; Perseus, the
| hero, flying to her rescue; Pegasus, the winged horse upon
| which Perseus is flying; Cepheus, Andromeda's father; and
| Cassiopeia, Andromeda's mother, whose actions set the whole
| story in motion.
| bluish29 wrote:
| I think a more accurate translation will be chained woman. At
| least the name used in Arabic culture [1].
|
| [1] https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/lmr'@_lmslsl@_(kwkb@)
| pengaru wrote:
| > Though it was a bit of a shock in an/the Arabic sky culture
| to find one of their constellations called "Woman chained to
| a post"!
|
| Welcome to mythology, no need to portray this as a uniquely
| Arabic horror.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Chained_to_the_Rocks
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| I used Stellarium to generate the realistic (but somewhat over
| exaggerated clarity) skies for my web game. The day/night cycle
| only shows stars at :50-00 of each hour: earth.suncapped.com.
|
| I'll edit into this comment a link to the texture files if I can,
| but the game uses compressed (ktx I think) textures since the
| star textures are large resolution, one of the largest game
| assets!
|
| I picked a particular date, time, and place on earth for
| rendering the sky in Stellarium. It also had options for seeing
| (clarity) and which features to show, such as planets or space
| debris.
| samstave wrote:
| Cool webgame... whats the premise tl;didnt-go-to-discord?
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| Thank you. Right now it's a just explorable small section of
| Colorado. The premise is a post-earth world where players
| build up villages around trade, inspired by Ultima Online.
| samstave wrote:
| UO Super Vet here. (was in the beta - we ran the Intel Game
| Lab DRG - and we ran 6 of intels top boxes with a t3 to the
| lab and just decimated)
|
| Dread Lord Phlux, HellFire Guild - Napa Shard. (and others)
| have tons of stories)
|
| -
|
| Would be interesting to grab the openGIS point maps of that
| section of colorado and make that the mesh - since your
| doing Stellarium for the sky.
|
| There is also that guy that made the tool to grab the 3D
| tiles from google earth for converting to meshes...
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| The map is based on GIS data of Colorado :) Including
| terrain elevations, landcover, and water.
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| Here's an original PNG exported from Stellarium. For the game
| this had to be reduced and compressed a lot:
| https://i.imgur.com/v3g219F.png
|
| Screenshot of how it looks in-game, this is Stellarium-
| generated and shown as a KTX texture on a 6-sided skybox:
| https://i.imgur.com/bkW2CXX.png
| Arnavion wrote:
| Stellarium is also scriptable, so I was able to write a cronjob
| that would launch Stellaris in an invisible background window,
| set my latitude and longitude, set a bunch of display options,
| save an image of the rendered sky to a file, and then update my
| desktop wallpaper to that file.
|
| But then I ended up not using it, because I use a tiling WM so I
| rarely see my desktop anyway lol. It's at
| https://github.com/Arnavion/sway-wallpaper-stellarium if anyone
| wants to use it.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| You don't see your desktop as in it's always covered or as in
| your WM hides the root window?
| Arnavion wrote:
| The former. A tiling WM covers the entire desktop with
| whatever windows are visible in the workspace. One window
| starts out full screen, creating a second window halves the
| first one and tiles them side-by-side, and so on. I would
| only see the desktop when I switch to a new empty workspace,
| but the reason I switched to a new empty workspace in the
| first place is because I wanted to start a new window there,
| so that glimpse of the desktop would be short-lived.
| Kharacternyk wrote:
| Many tiling WMs have an option for gaps between the
| windows. Do you find them unpleasant? I love my 8px gaps.
| Most of the wallpaper is still covered, though.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I personally hate those gaps. Wasted space.
| castalian wrote:
| Maybe these gaps should be filled with decoration. Like
| with ornaments similar to those you can find in medieval
| books.
| mschulkind wrote:
| Tiling window managers generally size windows as large as
| possible. Windows only shrink to make way for other windows,
| so unless you do something weird, or switch to a desktop with
| no windows, or have some sort of transparency enabled, you
| won't see your background at all.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Thanks for the idea and for the code!
| marcodiego wrote:
| Long time ago I wanted to make a small contribution to
| Stellarium. I have a telescope and "surface brightness" is a much
| better metric than what it showed at the time. I downloaded the
| code and with a quick inspection found out how to implement it. I
| modified the code and prepared a patch. When I was going to send
| it, I discovered someone else had simply implemented it a few
| days earlier. Nice. It saved me a little work.
|
| Now, what impressed me: I didn't explore it much but it gave me a
| very good impression of the code. I could find what I needed to
| change and someone else, without talking to me about it had the
| exact same idea. The changes were EXACTLY the same. I can only
| think this code is extremely high quality. It seems to be a
| standard developers should aim for.
| cbolton wrote:
| Interesting measure of code quality! I think it's the first
| time I see it.
| tantalor wrote:
| _There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way
| to do it._
| cbolton wrote:
| Haha right :) Though I feel we're talking of different
| levels of granularity: I've seen that quote applied at a
| level close to single operations, which makes sense when
| you're making judgment on a programming language or API. In
| OP's case I imagined a somewhat larger piece of code.
| throwaway_8462 wrote:
| I think it also is a measure for technical debt. If someone
| can easily understand the code and make changes, it is a sign
| of low technical debt.
|
| Too often developers measure code quality by applying
| personal subjective measures, like number of lines per
| method, DRY or choice of programming language and start
| making major refactoring based on personal preferences.
|
| If someone without knowledge of the code can swoop in and
| make meaningful changes, it does not matter how many lines of
| code there is or if it is built with X or Y. It's the end
| result that matters.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Check out the NetBSD or OpenSSH source. Both are exceptional
| derefr wrote:
| I think this is the sort of thing that developers really _want_
| , when they consider introducing a Domain Specific Language
| into their project: to take changes that, for either language-
| level or project-architecture reasons, currently have to be
| made, painfully, across N different parts of the code, ensuring
| they're all coherent with one-another and that none are missed;
| and to replace that with such changes requiring that only one
| piece of code be changed, where that code communicates the
| central spirit of the business constraint, from which all of
| the changes to disparate concerns in different modules, can
| then be derived.
|
| But, of course, even more ideally, you can 1. choose a language
| and 2. architect your project in such a way, that you don't
| even need any DSLs in order to accomplish that. :)
| kavaruka wrote:
| My high school in italy has a planetarium built with stellarium.
| I had a lot of fun with it as a kid
| mig39 wrote:
| Every time I see something interesting on hn, the first thing I
| try is:
|
| brew install stellarium
|
| I love it when it works!
| samstave wrote:
| I just realized that I need to make a Stellarium Wall art screen
| that has a stellarium in the background - and daily widget info
| in front.... !
| qwertox wrote:
| Interesting, they have a web version available:
|
| https://stellarium-web.org/
|
| Graphics performance and quality in browsers has improved so much
| in the last decade.
| tomcam wrote:
| Agreed, but I'm thinking this could have been done 15 years ago
| or more? Google Maps let you scroll around in real time way
| back when. Not correcting, just sort of asking--I'm way behind
| on how graphics coprocessors work these days.
| tkzed49 wrote:
| Maybe you could have used Shockwave or something? But until
| WebGL implementations were shipped in 2011, there was no 3D
| API accessible from Javascript. At the time, Google Maps just
| did 2D tile scrolling. I remember being super impressed when
| it started letting you zoom out to the globe like you could
| do in Google Earth.
| ummonk wrote:
| It's trivially easy to do 3D graphics using a 2D API if you
| don't need rasterized z-buffering (which Stellaris
| obviously doesn't).
| toddmorey wrote:
| 1.6 billion _known_ stars. Is that known as in labeled?
| cbolton wrote:
| I guess... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalogue :
|
| > The largest [catalogue] is being compiled from the spacecraft
| Gaia and thus far has over a billion stars.
|
| I think you'd have to go out of your way to "know" a large
| number of stars without having some equivalent of a label to
| keep track of them.
| jasonincanada wrote:
| I wrote a few scripts to help people study the orbits of the
| first five planets and moons with Stellarium. Here's one that is
| supposed to simulate a TV station that is on an hourly loop (it
| uses your computer clock to decide what should be showing at any
| minute of the hour)
|
| https://github.com/jasonincanada/stellarium-scripts/blob/mas...
| 1024core wrote:
| Is there a text-based version of such a thing? Say I give that
| lat/long and date/time; I want to know the positions of the
| planets and some of the major stars.
| madphilosopher wrote:
| Search for ephemeris software.
|
| For all my projects, I use the Swiss Ephemeris[0]. Their
| commandline swetest will give you the data you're after.
|
| [0] https://www.astro.com/swisseph/swephinfo_e.htm
| jes5199 wrote:
| planets only, but I spend a log of time playing with the NASA
| JPL Horizons system:
| https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/
| wlindley wrote:
| Grammar nitpick: it is "a piece of software" or "a program" or "a
| software system."
|
| You cannot have "one information, one music, one software" --
| those words are mass nouns, or can be used as adjectives.
| kstrauser wrote:
| And yet we all knew exactly, unambiguously, what they meant.
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| There seem to some Stellarium people here! It's a very cool app -
| does anyone know if it's possible to capture images from it
| programmatically?
| nvalis wrote:
| There is, for example like this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38982971
| globular-toast wrote:
| I love Stellarium. It got me into stargazing. I didn't realise at
| first that you can play with time, speeding it up, or go to
| specific times in the past or future to watch certain events like
| transits.
|
| There was another free software program that I thought of as a
| companion to Stellarium that let you fly through space. It used
| logarithmic scales for everything to make it manageable and
| really gave you an idea of the vastness of space. But I can't
| remember the name of it nor has searching brought it up.
|
| I'm hoping somebody here knows what I'm talking about.
| intrasight wrote:
| I'm excited about the VR version
|
| https://stellarium-labs.com/stellarium-vr/
| roschdal wrote:
| WebGl port of this please.
| wdfx wrote:
| Stellarium can also interface to hardware, so you can use it as a
| front end for go-to mounts and telescopes.
|
| It's my software of choice for setting up my DIY astrophotography
| rig.
|
| https://doug.lon.dev/2023/09/19/astro-camera-mount.html
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(page generated 2024-01-13 23:00 UTC)