Stellarium remote fun

I LOVE open source software! 

Stellarium is one of the top open source software packages for desktop sky viewing. Since I won't be presenting shows in a physical planetarium any time soon, I figured I should work out how to present better online.

Stellarium has a remote web interface plugin that is pretty easy to set up.  So I'm using my giant monitor for presentation and my little monitor for controls and for programming.

I'm clumsy with the on-screen menus, so having them on a separate monitor is great! Some actions take a while to set up, so I tried a little scripting to automate some stuff.

And then I decided that rather than hunting through pull-down menus for my little scripts I should make some buttons for scripts and actions.

So I started modifying the html. 

And relied on the kindness of a stranger's blog post to expose the functionality.

Thankfully I found an Atom package to make that json readable.

I don't often spend enough time in any given language to get good at it. But in this effort, I'm digging into Stellarium scripting/javascript, html, and to find the right language for scripting actions I found myself searching the source code for the project itself.