Stellarium

Command line to show objects

Asked by අනුරාධ Jayathilaka

Hi, I want to suggest a feature. I dont know where else to post this.

Is it possible to program Stellarium so if someone passes variables thru the command line ,ex: "Stellarium.exe -s moon" which will open up Stellarium showing the moon. This will become a very powerful feature when integrating Stellarium with other astronomical software.

Also if someone can develop an extension for chrome and firefox webmasters can embed links on there websites so when a user clicks a link it open up Stellarium with the given query. example: <a href="Stellarium:spica">click to see Spica</a>

Thanks.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Stellarium Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Matthew Gates (matthew-porpoisehead) said : 		#1

The procedure is to create a bug, describe the feature and set the severity to "wish list". It's not a very intuitive system - something I wish launchpad would implement is a better wish list system. In any case, I'll convert this to a bug report and change the status.

I like the idea, especially - and this is the hard part - if such a command would change the currently selected / centered object for a running instance of Stellarium if found. I think this would require a "wrapper" binary which would check for a running instance of Stellarium first, and use some sort of IPC mechanism to tell it what to selected, else launch a new instance.

Sadly there is no cross platform mechanism for this, so the wrapper would be horribly riddled with #ifdefs... maybe it would even be a shell script on *nix like systems, and a separate binary on windows. This sort of fragmentation is pretty hard to maintain and we would likely end up with multiple OS-specific bugs. Might still be worth doing if there is enough interest, but it's a bit ugly.

Revision history for this message
treaves (treaves) said : 		#2

Repsonded to.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask අනුරාධ Jayathilaka for more information if necessary.

To post a message you must log in.