7 ms·

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 behin

by JNRowe 5y ago

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

nullc 5y ago
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.
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I've been using stellarium pretty much exclusively and never heard of kstars. Will definitely give it a try.
  - nullc 5y ago
    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.
bitcharmer 5y ago
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.
gspr 5y ago
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.
- ccooffee 5y ago
  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.
  - gspr 5y ago
    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).

by JNRowe 5y ago

nullc 5y ago

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.

bitcharmer 5y ago
Thanks for sharing. I've been using stellarium pretty much exclusively and never heard of kstars. Will definitely give it a try.
- nullc 5y ago
  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.

bitcharmer 5y ago

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.

gspr 5y ago

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.

ccooffee 5y ago
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.
- gspr 5y ago
  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).