Stellarium

Shadow from the eclipsed Sun

Asked by blejavac

Hi
I have a question regarding shadows of the planets/bodies that are made by suns during the eclipse on the surface of other planets/bodies. Idea came last week when the annular eclipse of the Sun was seen from the Earth. I opened my config file, entered home planet - Moon and Long/Lat 0 deg. Had a nice view of the Earth but there was no Moon's shadow traveling on the path of the eclipse. So, could it be possible to create a shadow of the celestial bodies on the surfaces of other bodies? As it would be fun to watch the path of the eclipse, it would also help when a user wants to enter the specific location on affected planet/body to see what would otherwise be seen in real life from that specific place. For instance I didn't know the path of this eclipse, read it was in central Afica (small region, right:)?), and that it would peak in Indian Ocean. In GUI I zoomed in on the location map and started clicking, randomly at first, while the Stellarium showed where was the Moon nearing the Sun. As the clicking resulted in better locating me on the Earth's surface, I had to zoom in on the map more and more to get more accurate result. At this point Stellarium froze several times, had to ctrl-alt-del it and start again - remembered my last long/lat and set off from there. You can see how time consuming this was and even my software didn't like it:). So, if I had a shadow when looking down on Earth (ah, the pun!) from the Moon, I'd freeze the time, zoom in on the Earth (wow! - brainstorm: Could you make a long/lat grid on the known planets when looking at them - like on the globe?!), locate the center of the shadow, go back to Earth as home planet, enter the coordinates and - Voila! This would visually be something like this:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/SE2010Jan15A.gif but the Stellarium Style!
Thanks
Later
B

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Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab) said : 		#1

Rendering satellites' shadows on their parent planet has been on Stellarium's planned feature list for some time now. :)

As for the coordinates grid, it is unlikely - Stellarium is not Celestia. It's focused on observations from a planet's surface, not _of_ a planets surface. :) This can't prevent someone from implementing it as a plug-in, though.

Anyway, next time, go to NASA's website and search around. They have a nice page about eclipses tucked somewhere. For some of the eclipses, there were even lists of cities that lie on the shadow's path. Most of the world's sizable cities can be found in Stellarium's locations list.

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