I haven't figured out the Wayland solution yet, but on X11 you can use a tool called Devil's Pie to make Stellarium act as your desktop background, which is way more fun than any other desktop I've had: http://mooooo.ooo/stellarium-desktop/
I think the DE compositors should have an option to launch an application as background - full screen, always on the bottom. Wallpaper would just be an instance of an image viewer run this way. Animated wallpapers could just be ffmpeg or VLC playing a loop.
Demanding enough that I’d kill it before doing any gaming to get a small boost in FPS, but otherwise, when you aren’t interacting with it I think cpu usage was something like 3% on my i5 processor. When you’re moving around the view and such though, it does use a significant amount of cpu.
Stellarium is such a beautiful product. I used it back in college and shared it with the astrophysics majors, and they all loved it, too. Stellarium helped me play around with a telescope I had. There is so much joy in playing with a digital, interactive patch of the sky, then being able to look up through a lens and see the real thing a minute later.
As for Stellarium, I fell in love with the countryside aesthetic and how they really went for a VR-type feeling before VR ever became a buzzthing. My favorite features are zooming in and speeding up the clock. Stellarium put a surprising amount of detail into their product, I suggest pushing all of those features to their limits. You will be pleasantly surprised with how far they go.
It’s really handy for astrophotographers, too - I use Astroplanner to chuck together a list of potential targets for a given night or set of nights, then check them out in stellarium, where I’ve imported my actual horizon from my site, and my scope and camera combinations for framing - means I can ensure I’m not wasting time trying to image something obscured by trees or terrain - I’m in a Y shaped valley with a horizon that goes from 10 to 50 degrees which makes this impossible to sensibly automate.
The it’s just on to an SGP sequence, and let it run.
really went for a VR-type feeling before VR ever became a buzzthing
As I remember it, the peak of the VR hype was 1993—SIGGRAPH ’93 was full of the stuff, Snow Crash came out in 1992, and of course Neuromancer had come out in 1984 and True Names came out 1981. Google N-Grams seems to back up this perception: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Virtual+realit...
When I clicked "Allow to use my location" I was really hoping that the scenery would change to Google Streetview or something for my exact location. That would make it easier to orient myself. I'm sure that's on the roadmap in the future as the streetview stuff continues to improve and be easier to remix.
Now this is a good idea. Is there a feature where you can use your webcam or phone's cam to scan in your current surroundings, and then potential use a model to strip out the sky and replace it with Stellarium?
Is there anything like (formerly) Google Skymap that works? In the "good old days", Skymap was my goto to answer the question "what is that point of light in the sky?"
The most recent versions of Skymap don't seem to work for me _at all_. I have to use the manual orientation.
I got it from F-Droid and it works just like always for me. Maybe your phone lacks a necessary sensor.
When I was shopping for a phone lately I noticed that there are still fairly expensive phones lacking a compass or a gyroscope, sometimes depending on the region they are sold.
Nice! But Google Skymap is for mobile and its key benefit was that I could literally point at the point of light I was looking at with the phone and get a good guess as to what it was. KStars looks like a desktop app.
Also... Making me yearn to get back into backyard astronomy.
This link pops up every other month on HN, and every time it makes me remember all those nights spent trying to find in the sky the stars I had seen on the software and I smile :).
If you don't work at a place that expects you to work 80 hours per week it's certainly easier to find time. Love Stellarium, now you can even predict ISS passings accurately to see it IRL.
We waived the usual dupe criteria (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) since people like this project so much, and it hasn't had so much attention relative to its (and HN's) history.
i recommend devilspie2 highly, for years it was the only way i found to remove window decorations from ubuntu unity, remove UI drop shadows from notification windows, and a few other wm- agnostic quality of life tweaks
