
Stellarium Web: Online Planetarium - phsilva
https://stellarium-web.org/
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autocorr
Stellarium [0] is such a great project. We even used it in an upper-division
college observational astronomy course to perform the historical experiment to
measure the Earth-Sun distance (the astronomical unit or au). It was a lot of
fun, we mock-observed the transit of Venus [1] from two different latitudes to
perform the same calculation done in 1769 on James Cooke's expidition from
Tahiti [2].

[0] [http://stellarium.org](http://stellarium.org) [1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus)
[2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1769_Transit_of_Venus_observ...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1769_Transit_of_Venus_observed_from_Tahiti)

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guillaumec
I am one of the developers. Nice to see the project getting first page of
hackernews. If you have any technical question about how it was done, feel
free to ask.

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arriu
Where can we find the C source to the stellarium-web-engine.js file? thanks!

edit: It looks like this is it [https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium-web-
engine](https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium-web-engine)

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guillaumec
That's the one.

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arriu
I was expecting a lot more code, you guys did a great job cleaning up and
reducing the original desktop codebase.

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guillaumec
Yes, but here having a small code is a necessity since we can't have a too big
final executable on a website. I am actually still thinking we could make it
even smaller.

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joshumax
I've been following the Stellarium project for upwards of a decade and I'm
always pleasantly surprised at how far it's come, even if I still have a few
grips about telescope integration (still no built-in ASCOM or INDI
interfaces).

I did some work for a company about 2 years ago to port a stripped-down
version of Stellarium for internal-use on some custom ARM-based in-field
devices (the company worked in the satcom industry) and I'm still amazed at
the amount of complexity that goes into astronomical simulation. In fact, I
recommend devs interested in this space check out the Stellarium source repo,
which provides ample amounts of well-designed (Qt-ish) C++ surrounding
astronomical projection, star rendering, ephemeris calculation, etc.

While this online-version doesn't seem to share _too_ much with the regular
desktop Stellarium (WebAssembly port, anyone?) it does appear to be one of the
best web-based planetariums currently.

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bscphil
>I've been following the Stellarium project for upwards of a decade and I'm
always pleasantly surprised at how far it's come

Likewise. My first ever open source contributions were to the Stellarium
project at about the age of 14. The regular volunteers (especially Matthew)
were unbelievably patient and helpful. Working on Stellarium was what really
pushed me to spend a lot of time learning programming.

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xalioth
Hey that's one of the nicest compliment I ever got from a user/contributor,
thanks! (Fabien from Stellarium team)

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bscphil
Thank _you_ for your devoted work on Stellarium for so many years!

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grondilu
When I learned about Webassembly, stellarium was high on the list of programs
I thought would be nice if ported to the web. Like many people, I enjoy
geeking about space and astronomy from times to times, but not enough to
bother installing a dedicated software or keeping it up to date. Call me lazy
if you want, but I'm sure there are many people like me. Now I know if I want
to look at the sky on my computer, it's just one url in my web browser.
Thanks.

A port for Celestia would be nice too.

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microcolonel
Surprising how well integrated this is. I half expected this to be a direct
port of the thing, with the same Qt UI, to Emscripten. Instead, there is some
actual proper HTML UI overlayed on the WebGL canvas.

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GomatiTech
This brings back memories. I have spent countless hours playing on the desktop
versions years ago. An excellent piece of software, and glad it has a web
version now. Bookmarking! And thank you!

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stblack
Here's a nice surprise: it appears to work just great on Safari on iOS.

Setting your location could be easier, but color me impressed.

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lucb1e
The location defaults to (0,0) for me. Usually it's at least accurate to the
country, which is accurate enough for this purpose. Setting it wasn't a big
deal to me -- again, I just drop it anywhere in the country because it doesn't
make a difference anyway, at least in Europe.

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xalioth
In theory, the location should be auto-detected, if you allow your browser to
send it

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z3t4
A cold winter, perfectly clear sky, in a dark, dark forest out in nowhere,
wearing night-vision goggles I looked up for a moment, and was stunned. It's
ridiculous to think we are the only intelligent life out there, when every mm
of the sky is filled with stars and galaxies.

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timonoko
It needs to be localized. In other languages stars and constellations have
more entertaining names, not just latin derivatives. Google translator seems
to do just fine, judging by "Otava. Linnunrata. Pohjantähti."

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asterismic
I'd really enjoy seeing integration with Google Street view (where possible),
to modify the terrestrial panorama, as the foreground for what the user might
expect to see on the ground, for any given pin dropped on the map.

It starts the viewing on Null Island (0 Lat / 0 Long) when geolocation is
refused, so the grassy farm field is cool, but it's be neat to pull the view
into cities, to see what the sky would look like, if the light pollution
weren't getting in the way.

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diebir
Stellarium is one of those apps that is capable of bringing a powerful new
Macbook Pro to its knees. It's a great app, but the quality (at least on Mac)
is complete crap. There's no QA, apparently. The recent versions on Mac have
been basically unusable. Too bad.

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krylon
This is really cool! I am not much of an amateur astronomer, but I regularly
use the desktop version to look up what I just saw in the sky.

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gonvaled
Landscape? That's just dummy data, right?

Can I set the timezone? Or can it be inferred from the location? The location
is properly detected ...

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lucb1e
Landscape is dummy, yes.

Timezone I'm not sure, but the time can be set using the slider in the right
bottom corner.

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pirvandrei
How acurate is this?

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xalioth
Accuracy is good for present time (i.e. +- a few days from now), but degrades
quickly with time (for planets, satellites etc..). For the online version we
can't afford to use full planetary models (like in the desktop version) as it
would be too much data to download at startup.

