Stellarium

Light noise color / atmospheric distortion

Asked by MKP

This is an amazing app. I just wanted to make two suggestions, though small.

One is it would be great if one could change the color of the light pollution from reds, to blues or whites to reflect the local environment. This could more accurately hide stars that otherwise might be seen where they of a contrasting color, perhaps.

The second is I noticed when I turned off the atmosphere that star positions did not change. Further, there doesn't seem to be increased distortion with the atmosphere closer to the horizon. If it's already factored in, it would be great to see things as they truly are when the atmosphere is turned off.

At any rate, just two probably cheesy observations from a lay person.

Thanks again for all your work and all the best.

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Matthew Gates
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Best Matthew Gates (matthew-porpoisehead) said : 		#1

Thanks for the positive feedback - always nice to hear from someone who likes the project.

Regarding light pollution: As I understand it, the color of light pollution varies a great deal from place to place, As far as I know there is no data available which we might use to model the color based on location,any in any case such a light pollution map would be a large amount of data and I don't know if we'd want to ship with that. This leaves the possibility of having the color customizable somehow. This sounds doable, although I don't know if there's anyone who wants to implement it.

Regarding atmosphere/positions: There is currently work going on to model atmospheric refraction. This will probably be in the next release. If you can build from source, check out the lp:~georg-zotti/stellarium/refraction branch.

Regarding atmosphere / twinkle: It is true that twinkle should turn off when the atmosphere is not modeled, There was a discussion about this some time ago, and IIRC, the result was that Fabien liked it the way it is, He's our benevolent dictator, so I don't think it's going to change. :-)

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MKP (info-issg) said : 		#2

Thanks for the reply and sounds fantastic. I wish I were a coder and could join in (or fully appreciate) the fun, but I look forward to the next release or whichever thereafter includes the atmospheric refraction addition. As for the light pollution question, that's a great point about the data quantity issue. And certainly that data couldn't always be accurate either. A user-tweakable color setting for that would certainly be all that I would need, and I bet the same would go for others.

Btw., no worries on the twinkle. :D

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MKP (info-issg) said : 		#3

Thanks Matthew Gates, that solved my question.