Request: archaeo-astronomy features
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
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Stellarium |
Fix Released
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Wishlist
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gzotti |
Bug Description
Hello there
I use Stellarium for archaeo-astronomy, so I'm using ancient stone circles as a landscape and trying to find out positions of Sun-rises and sunsets etc. in relation to the standing stones within the landscape. Unfortunately, at Sunrise and sunset, the landscape goes dark! This makes it very difficult to see what is going on - great for photo-realism but not great for me. Also, when the atmosphere is turned on it's not easy to see the central disc of the Sun because of all the glare. Can we have toggles to take care of these problems? E.g. a thin circle could be drawn around the disc of the Sun to make it more obvious.
The new compass and angle plug-ins with 0.10.3 are great but I would like to see a feature for "landscape lines", that is, lines centred on the position of the observer that run along the ground to the horizon at a given Azimuth angle. The ability to plot several of these and also to be able to measure the angles (on the ground) between them would be a boon.
In addition to this it would be nice to be able to draw straight lines on the landscape between arbitary ground positions (i.e. not centred on the viewer)
The ability to save all these lines so that they can be loaded up at a later date would be important, obviously.
For archaeo-astronomy it is crucial that the landscape is oriented correctly so that East in the landscape matches with true East etc. However at the moment this either involves a lot of image manipulation or doing calculations to find a value for Rotatez. It would be a lot nicer if it were possible to re-position the landscape by dragging and dropping within Stellarium, which would update the value of Rotatez in the landscape.ini file, and then "locking" it in place once it is positioned correctly. This feature could also be used to get the horizon properly positioned.
Finally would it be possible to have an option for a translucent landscape toggle? This would be a boon because the landscape of today might be very different from the landscape of 4000 years ago. It would also make it easier to see when the Sun is about to rise etc.
That's all I can think of for now.
Ian
Changed in stellarium: | |
importance: | Undecided → Wishlist |
Changed in stellarium: | |
status: | New → Opinion |
tags: | added: archaeoastronomy |
Changed in stellarium: | |
status: | Fix Committed → Fix Released |
Hi! I am using Stellarium for similar things.
Actually, at least the old_style landscape currently is buggy regarding the altitude position (decor_alt_angle and decor_angle_shift). I sent a partial fix (only landscape, no correction for fog so far) to Fabien, but he wants a cleanup in this landscape type, so it is not yet in 0.10.3, and you should stick to the newer landscape types.
Regarding horizon brightness at sunset, he accepted my simple brightening approach for 0.10.3.
For archaeo-astronomy, please be aware that some issues (deltaT and high-precision precession) are currently only in the "blueprints" wishlist.
Actually, for alignment studies, a plugin allowing a walkthrough in a 3D model would be a splendid addition.
I think Stellarium has high potential here!
Regards,
Georg