This program is unbelievably wonderful. It's so wonderful that I only have one feature request! :=)
This is aimed at those of us still in the early stages of learning the sky and it would make it quite a lot easier for us.
Basically when I step out onto my back porch out in the country (ie no city lights) on a cloudless night with my laptop and look up I see something very different from the stellarium screen, depending on 3 factors:
General haze
Horizon haze height
Moon brightness
The general haze limits my view to objects only above a certain brightness. Near the horizon the haze, at some point, basically blocks everything. The height of that drop off varies night to night. And of course the moon brightness and position will also affect visibility.
So what I'd love to have is a slider or key command (or two or three) to adjust these factors as they are simulated by Stellarium. This way I could get my laptop to look just like the sky looks an any given cloudless night. This would make it much easier to orient myself to the brightest objects and also point things out to my wife/children etc.
Does this sound possible?
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We discussed this on our recent meeting, a few days before you posted this, and I think we agreed your suggestion to be the best and most accessible implementation of the "limiting stars by brightness" feature: a simple slider. It won't be in the next version, which is scheduled for june, but after that, with the new graphical user interface we'll be using, it won't take long before this feature is present.
Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated!
Johan
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That sounds great! Do you think it will be able to have a "fall-off?" By this I mean that even here, where it's quite hazy, it's usually quite clear looking straight up and the visibility decreases as you move to the horizon.
Thanks!
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Unrelated comment: It seems the star magnitude model could use some work. You would never know Sirius was the brightest star in the night sky from the model Stellarium uses. Celestia seems to do a much better job rendering relative star magnitude.
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This program is unbelievably wonderful. It's so wonderful that I only have one feature request! :=)
This is aimed at those of us still in the early stages of learning the sky and it would make it quite a lot easier for us.
Basically when I step out onto my back porch out in the country (ie no city lights) on a cloudless night with my laptop and look up I see something very different from the stellarium screen, depending on 3 factors:
The general haze limits my view to objects only above a certain brightness. Near the horizon the haze, at some point, basically blocks everything. The height of that drop off varies night to night. And of course the moon brightness and position will also affect visibility.
So what I'd love to have is a slider or key command (or two or three) to adjust these factors as they are simulated by Stellarium. This way I could get my laptop to look just like the sky looks an any given cloudless night. This would make it much easier to orient myself to the brightest objects and also point things out to my wife/children etc.
Does this sound possible?
We discussed this on our recent meeting, a few days before you posted this, and I think we agreed your suggestion to be the best and most accessible implementation of the "limiting stars by brightness" feature: a simple slider. It won't be in the next version, which is scheduled for june, but after that, with the new graphical user interface we'll be using, it won't take long before this feature is present.
Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated!
Johan
That sounds great! Do you think it will be able to have a "fall-off?" By this I mean that even here, where it's quite hazy, it's usually quite clear looking straight up and the visibility decreases as you move to the horizon.
Thanks!
I agree it would be nice to see some sort of extinction function added. I mentioned this last year in my reply to this thread:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1513526&forum_id=278769
Unrelated comment: It seems the star magnitude model could use some work. You would never know Sirius was the brightest star in the night sky from the model Stellarium uses. Celestia seems to do a much better job rendering relative star magnitude.
Star magnitude rendering algorithms have improved in the development version, along with a larger star catalog.
Rob