Please excuse if this is explained elsewhere. I searched and read threads (and doc) about "stars in 0.9.0" and several others related to 0.9.0 and couldn't find this. By the way, I'm really just trying to understand and not complaining or criticizing - Stellarium is a wonderful piece of software that I often use in public presentations as a JPL Solar System Ambassador (fancy title for a volunteer informal educator who talks to kids about astronomy and space). It's hard for them (and me) to believe it is free, so thanks!
Nothwithstanding new features to handle a wider dynamic range of star brightness and displayed size (and colors etc.), it seems to me that starting with the default view with 60 degree FOV that Venus and Jupiter in particular are rendered extremely large, bigger than the (unscaled) Moon for Venus. This seems to be a halo effect which disappears with extreme zoom-in. I know Jupiter and especially Venus are awfully bright, and there are limitations when using the small dynamic range of a computer display to map a wide range of brightness and disk size (and a small range of pixel cluster sizes to map a lot of size variation esp. in planets), but this seems to be too much. Is there any way to reduce this apparent exaggeration, even at the cost of losing some true relative magnitude information?
Thanks,
Bruce
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The thread that refered to this subject is "Jupiter and Moons" a few days ago.
Essentially the size and type of the display of the planets and their moons is governed by the texture refered to in the ssystem.ini file.
Matthew generated an alternative halo for the small moons which looks great and the I also made some alternative textures for other stars and major planets by creating a larger black border around the other two textures star16x16.png and star64x64.png, giving them a new name and calling these new textures in the ssystem.ini file where necessary. This method will allow you to personalise your display to whatever you like.
Editing the graphics can be done nicely in TheGimp by increasing the canvas size (black fill) and then resizing the texture to modular 2 then giving it a name of your choosing.
Barry
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I thought this way: Objects that are too small to be rendered with a surface texture, are rendered like stars. This is the Sun and Moon when zoomed out, Jupiter, Venus, Phobos& Deimos when standing on Mars,... An object with magnitude -12 must be drawn noticably brighter than an object of magnitude -11, -10, -9, and so on. So when you write in
ssystem.ini:
[moon]
...
halo = true
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_big_halo = haloLune.png
...
you get my version of the moon halo, with the full moon (mag=-11) having reasonable brightness, certainly much brighter than Venus. But Fabien did not like this consistent behaviour, and instead made a very nice special halo texture for the moon. Which has the disadvantage, that the moon often looks too faint, so that the moon appears fainter than Venus. Also observing the moon when standing on Mars is a problem with the new moon halo.
If I knew an easy solution for this magnitude problem, I would have implemented it already. My favourite idea is to adjust all magnitude to the brightest object in the window, but this is not that easy, and will hopefully be done at least in version 1.0 or 0.10, whatever it will be called.
Believe me, I am also not satisfied with the current star rendering. But I was even less satisfied with version 0.8 ( because now stars with different brightness are rendered in different sizes).
And no, there is no maximum star disk size, so that all starlike objects brighter than mag=-1 are drawn with the same brightness (a behaviour that I would regard as a bug, if there would be no option to turn it off). You can make all star disk sizes smaller with setting
[stars]
star_scale = 0.7
star_mag_scale = 1.0
in config.ini. Please try doing so. For my taste star_scale, star_mag_scale is to big in the default configuration.
Yours,
Johannes
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Please excuse if this is explained elsewhere. I searched and read threads (and doc) about "stars in 0.9.0" and several others related to 0.9.0 and couldn't find this. By the way, I'm really just trying to understand and not complaining or criticizing - Stellarium is a wonderful piece of software that I often use in public presentations as a JPL Solar System Ambassador (fancy title for a volunteer informal educator who talks to kids about astronomy and space). It's hard for them (and me) to believe it is free, so thanks!
Nothwithstanding new features to handle a wider dynamic range of star brightness and displayed size (and colors etc.), it seems to me that starting with the default view with 60 degree FOV that Venus and Jupiter in particular are rendered extremely large, bigger than the (unscaled) Moon for Venus. This seems to be a halo effect which disappears with extreme zoom-in. I know Jupiter and especially Venus are awfully bright, and there are limitations when using the small dynamic range of a computer display to map a wide range of brightness and disk size (and a small range of pixel cluster sizes to map a lot of size variation esp. in planets), but this seems to be too much. Is there any way to reduce this apparent exaggeration, even at the cost of losing some true relative magnitude information?
Thanks,
Bruce
Hi Bruce
The thread that refered to this subject is "Jupiter and Moons" a few days ago.
Essentially the size and type of the display of the planets and their moons is governed by the texture refered to in the ssystem.ini file.
Matthew generated an alternative halo for the small moons which looks great and the I also made some alternative textures for other stars and major planets by creating a larger black border around the other two textures star16x16.png and star64x64.png, giving them a new name and calling these new textures in the ssystem.ini file where necessary. This method will allow you to personalise your display to whatever you like.
Editing the graphics can be done nicely in TheGimp by increasing the canvas size (black fill) and then resizing the texture to modular 2 then giving it a name of your choosing.
Barry
Dear Bruce,
I thought this way: Objects that are too small to be rendered with a surface texture, are rendered like stars. This is the Sun and Moon when zoomed out, Jupiter, Venus, Phobos& Deimos when standing on Mars,... An object with magnitude -12 must be drawn noticably brighter than an object of magnitude -11, -10, -9, and so on. So when you write in
ssystem.ini:
[moon]
...
halo = true
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_big_halo = haloLune.png
...
you get my version of the moon halo, with the full moon (mag=-11) having reasonable brightness, certainly much brighter than Venus. But Fabien did not like this consistent behaviour, and instead made a very nice special halo texture for the moon. Which has the disadvantage, that the moon often looks too faint, so that the moon appears fainter than Venus. Also observing the moon when standing on Mars is a problem with the new moon halo.
If I knew an easy solution for this magnitude problem, I would have implemented it already. My favourite idea is to adjust all magnitude to the brightest object in the window, but this is not that easy, and will hopefully be done at least in version 1.0 or 0.10, whatever it will be called.
Believe me, I am also not satisfied with the current star rendering. But I was even less satisfied with version 0.8 ( because now stars with different brightness are rendered in different sizes).
And no, there is no maximum star disk size, so that all starlike objects brighter than mag=-1 are drawn with the same brightness (a behaviour that I would regard as a bug, if there would be no option to turn it off). You can make all star disk sizes smaller with setting
[stars]
star_scale = 0.7
star_mag_scale = 1.0
in config.ini. Please try doing so. For my taste star_scale, star_mag_scale is to big in the default configuration.
Yours,
Johannes