Stellarium Web: Online Planetarium

Stellarium [0] is such a great project. We even used it in an upper-division college observational astronomy course to perform the historical experiment to measure the Earth-Sun distance (the astronomical unit or au). It was a lot of fun, we mock-observed the transit of Venus [1] from two different latitudes to perform the same calculation done in 1769 on James Cooke&#x27;s expidition from Tahiti [2].<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stellarium.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stellarium.org</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transit_of_Venus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transit_of_Venus</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1769_Transit_of_Venus_observed_from_Tahiti" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1769_Transit_of_Venus_observ...</a>

I am one of the developers. Nice to see the project getting first page of hackernews. If you have any technical question about how it was done, feel free to ask.

I&#x27;ve been following the Stellarium project for upwards of a decade and I&#x27;m always pleasantly surprised at how far it&#x27;s come, even if I still have a few grips about telescope integration (still no built-in ASCOM or INDI interfaces).<p>I did some work for a company about 2 years ago to port a stripped-down version of Stellarium for internal-use on some custom ARM-based in-field devices (the company worked in the satcom industry) and I&#x27;m still amazed at the amount of complexity that goes into astronomical simulation. In fact, I recommend devs interested in this space check out the Stellarium source repo, which provides ample amounts of well-designed (Qt-ish) C++ surrounding astronomical projection, star rendering, ephemeris calculation, etc.<p>While this online-version doesn&#x27;t seem to share <i>too</i> much with the regular desktop Stellarium (WebAssembly port, anyone?) it does appear to be one of the best web-based planetariums currently.

When I learned about Webassembly, stellarium was high on the list of programs I thought would be nice if ported to the web. Like many people, I enjoy geeking about space and astronomy from times to times, but not enough to bother installing a dedicated software or keeping it up to date. Call me lazy if you want, but I&#x27;m sure there are many people like me. Now I know if I want to look at the sky on my computer, it&#x27;s just one url in my web browser. Thanks.<p>A port for Celestia would be nice too.

This brings back memories. I have spent countless hours playing on the desktop versions years ago. An excellent piece of software, and glad it has a web version now. Bookmarking! And thank you!

Here&#x27;s a nice surprise: it appears to work just great on Safari on iOS.<p>Setting your location could be easier, but color me impressed.

A cold winter, perfectly clear sky, in a dark, dark forest out in nowhere, wearing night-vision goggles I looked up for a moment, and was stunned. It&#x27;s ridiculous to think we are the only intelligent life out there, when every mm of the sky is filled with stars and galaxies.

It needs to be localized. In other languages stars and constellations have more entertaining names, not just latin derivatives. Google translator seems to do just fine, judging by &quot;Otava. Linnunrata. Pohjantähti.&quot;

I&#x27;d really enjoy seeing integration with Google Street view (where possible), to modify the terrestrial panorama, as the foreground for what the user might expect to see on the ground, for any given pin dropped on the map.<p>It starts the viewing on Null Island (0 Lat &#x2F; 0 Long) when geolocation is refused, so the grassy farm field is cool, but it&#x27;s be neat to pull the view into cities, to see what the sky would look like, if the light pollution weren&#x27;t getting in the way.

Stellarium is one of those apps that is capable of bringing a powerful new Macbook Pro to its knees. It&#x27;s a great app, but the quality (at least on Mac) is complete crap. There&#x27;s no QA, apparently. The recent versions on Mac have been basically unusable. Too bad.

This is really cool! I am not much of an amateur astronomer, but I regularly use the desktop version to look up what I just saw in the sky.

Landscape? That&#x27;s just dummy data, right?<p>Can I set the timezone? Or can it be inferred from the location? The location is properly detected ...

How acurate is this?

Surprising how well integrated this is. I half expected this to be a direct port of the thing, with the same Qt UI, to Emscripten. Instead, there is some actual proper HTML UI overlayed on the WebGL canvas.