Hi all!
I'd like to talk about a behavior of Stellarium, that can be always reproduced.
Please enter "Astronomical calculation" page: now activating "Phenomena" calculations for a long period of time (it's very easy to choose one year!) actually stops Stellarium for a long time.
There's no indication of what's happening, for example a progress bar, and after a few seconds in Windows 10 (64 bits) in the header bar of Stellarium appears the message "Stellarium 0.15.1 (not responding)", as in the attached image.
There's no way to stop calculation, if you change your mind, apart from a brute force way, clicking on the upper right "X" of Stellarium window.
With my surprise, a lot of computing time is spent on quite unnecessary phenomena for example like "oppositions between Moon and other planets" (astrological computations??) :(
Please consider that for observers the most important events are "conjunctions"!
So there should be at least a way to select which events to compute.
I started computing of Phenomena between Moon and "Bright stars (<5.0 mag)" for a 1 year period...
after one minute I decided to kill the program... :(
Thanks a lot!
Pierluigi Panunzi
I agree phenomena could be made selectable, and yes, oppositions of moon and planets are hardly relevant for today's observers. Actually, simulating with a computer is not relevant for observers, only the observation in the sky is. ;-) But in context of historical research, even what may appear to be "only astrologically relevant" phenomena can be interesting for some users.
The AstroCalc is a rather new feature, so it will likely undergo a few more improvements. For the time being, just don't overuse it, or expect to also wait for 5 minutes.