
Avebury North Circle is available on the Stellarium landscapes page, and very fine it is too.
Why so sad? Surely that's a good thing?Grahame Gardner wrote:Stellarium 0.10.3 ...which is a great one for checking the accuracy of your landscapes....
Says he with his GPS-aligned landscapes....Ian Pegler wrote:Why so sad? Surely that's a good thing?
Bwa ha ha ha...Grahame Gardner wrote:Says he with his GPS-aligned landscapes....
As readers of Dowsing Today will now know, this is actually not a dowser, it's Tom Flowers. For more information see:
The key here is to discover the correct value for angle_rotatez. Once you have have this in your .ini file you're done.[landscape]
name = Avebury North Circle
author = Ian Pegler
description = The North Circle at the massive megalithic site of Avebury, England.
type = spherical
maptex = AveburyNorth.png
angle_rotatez = 215.67
[location]
planet = Earth
latitude = +51d25'45"
longitude = -1d51'14"
altitude = 162
Hello there
I use Stellarium for archaeo-astronomy, so I'm using ancient stone circles as a landscape and trying to find out positions of Sun-rises and sunsets etc. in relation to the standing stones within the landscape. Unfortunately, at Sunrise and sunset, the landscape goes dark! This makes it very difficult to see what is going on - great for photo-realism but not great for me. Also, when the atmosphere is turned on it's not easy to see the central disc of the Sun because of all the glare. Can we have toggles to take care of these problems? E.g. a thin circle could be drawn around the disc of the Sun to make it more obvious.
The new compass and angle plug-ins with 0.10.3 are great but I would like to see a feature for "landscape lines", that is, lines centred on the position of the observer that run along the ground to the horizon at a given Azimuth angle. The ability to plot several of these and also to be able to measure the angles (on the ground) between them would be a boon.
In addition to this it would be nice to be able to draw straight lines on the landscape between arbitary ground positions (i.e. not centred on the viewer)
The ability to save all these lines so that they can be loaded up at a later date would be important, obviously.
For archaeo-astronomy it is crucial that the landscape is oriented correctly so that East in the landscape matches with true East etc. However at the moment this either involves a lot of image manipulation or doing calculations to find a value for Rotatez. It would be a lot nicer if it were possible to re-position the landscape by dragging and dropping within Stellarium, which would update the value of Rotatez in the landscape.ini file, and then "locking" it in place once it is positioned correctly. This feature could also be used to get the horizon properly positioned.
Finally would it be possible to have an option for a translucent landscape toggle? This would be a boon because the landscape of today might be very different from the landscape of 4000 years ago. It would also make it easier to see when the Sun is about to rise etc.
That's all I can think of for now.
Ian
I recently discovered how to make the landscapes translucent by editing the png file using GIMP. I won't go into the specifics here, it's a bit technical. So I now have semi-transparent versions of the Avebury North Circle and Mithcell's Fold landscapes and having installed them as extra landscapes I can flip between the opaque and translucent versions as needs be.Finally would it be possible to have an option for a translucent landscape toggle? This would be a boon because the landscape of today might be very different from the landscape of 4000 years ago. It would also make it easier to see when the Sun is about to rise etc.
Hi GrahameGrahame Gardner wrote:Ian, I presume you know that you can simply turn the landscape 'off' from the toolbar? If you toggle it on and off you can get a pretty good idea of where the object you're looking at is about to rise, particularly if you also turn on the equatorial grid and the new compass bearings plug-in.
You can also turn the atmosphere off, which makes the sun a smaller circle, but if you do that everything goes dark anyway!