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.

A stitch in time (or space)

Since the planetarium will be operating online for the foreseeable future, I've been working on ways to give everything a nice local touch.

One way has been to make custom panoramas for use with Stellarium.

William M. Staerkel Planetarium             

Parkland College

Champaign-Urbana Astronomical
Society Observatory

We should be able to use them with our Digistar 6 in the dome when we are able to reopen. I like making content that can be used on different platforms


I used a DSLR with a fisheye lens on a tripod to get a good selection of overlapping images, making sure to have some shots with objects of interest centered.




I used Hugin to stitch the images. It's not super automatic, but there are builtin tools for aligning and for masking out troublesome spots.

Finally, I use Gimp to fix up the nadir a bit and to get rid of the sky. I also fix up any small stitching errors that I missed earlier. Some distant power lines and light poles will end up cut in the process, but I can live with that.




It's a messy process, but I use brightness and contrast settings and sometimes desaturation to get a nice mask. I work in smaller sections and then combine them.


And I usually have to over-mask the vegetation because I don't have the patience to cut out around each leaf.


Don't forget to check your edge seams. Layer > Transform > Offset and select "By width/2" with "wrap around" selected for Edge Behavior.