The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

A project to create a fictional astronomy for Shireroth and its world
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Shyriath
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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Shyriath »

I like both the second and third ones... The second reminds me of a very clear night sky, very black background and stars that aren't too overstated, but the distribution is a bit too even.The third has a fuzzier-looking sky, not nearly as black and clear (maybe could be kept as an atmospheric effect), but the distribution is more interesting, though the clustering does go a little overboard there on the left.Maybe if we could get a middle ground between the two...

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Fax Celestis
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The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Fax Celestis »

((Images removed for size reasons))First Attempt (1024x1024)Second Attempt (1024x1024)Third Attempt (1024x1024)These are by no means final. I fully plan to make a few other "skies" and then go with the best two. We will need one for the northern and southern hemispheres, after all.Feedback appreciated. Viatax Sitadi Axdivijink Regigoraauk

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by RicLyon »

I think we need two night skies. One for all of our territories north of the equator and one for the ones south of it.And how does the nightsky look if you stand on the equator? *confused* Richard LyonYansha Elaer Kyon gef ShanPernem kahn gef kuymal per varga stiPernem kahn gef varga per kuymal sti

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Kaiser Yarad I »

I agree with Shyriath, a mix between the second and third attempts would be good, as the clustering in the third one is a bit....yeah, overboard is the word. I mean I know it's said that two galaxies could pass through each other without a single collision, but there'd be bound to be a few with that one.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by graius »

1&3

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Shyriath »

Quote:I mean I know it's said that two galaxies could pass through each other without a single collision, but there'd be bound to be a few with that one.Well *Enters pedantry mode* it'd be more likely to be a nearby star cluster in our own galaxy, really. Further-off colliding galaxies wouldn't be nearly so bright.Quote:I think we need two night skies. One for all of our territories north of the equator and one for the ones south of it.Yes, there will be a northern and southern hemisphere.Quote:And how does the nightsky look if you stand on the equator? *confused*That, sadly, is going to be the problem with the two maps; it's hard to use them by themselves to get an idea of what the sky actually looks like (at least, from anywhere other than the poles of the planet). What we might want to try to do, eventually, is find a way to turn the two star maps into one sphere, and then find a way to view the sphere at from any latitude/longitude... although the view would vary with season.... hmmmm. Edit: Fixed a quote. Edited by: Shyriath  at: 11/13/05 16:35

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Nathan of Natopia »

Very impressive! I like the second one. I'm wondering if a clustering of stars in a band across the sky would be a good addition too... To show that Micras is in a galaxy, well, a spiral or eliptical one. I guess Micras can be in one of the sphereical-type galaxies. His Sovereign Majesty, NathanSoivereign Natopian EmperorNatopiaForumsJoin the Renaissance! Empire Library

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Shyriath »

Yes, definitely going to have to figure out what kind of galaxy we're in... it's going to affect the final view of the sky. I know there's spiral, elliptical (spherical), irregular, compact dwarf...

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Fax Celestis »

I'll try to do a few more skies tonight, and we'll see what comes out best.For now, I think we're going to do two views: from the poles. if we can figure how to mod this later, we'll gof rom there. Viatax Sitadi Axdivijink Regigoraauk

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by AngelGuardian93 »

This is way over my head, but tre nifty. There are no flowers, no not this time. There will be no angels gracing the lines, just these stark words I find.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by UEC »

ie.. a Planetarium...Maybe we should hook up with the MCS on this... Set it as the official starmap for the MCS world map... (Yes.. I do refuse to call it Micras.. it's the MCS world Map.. it's my oppinion that by naming the map we violate the nuetrality of the MCS by dictating culture...And I don't like the name Micras.. never have.. always sounded really lame.. like we are a world of midgets or something... micropeople... or something... (No bill.. Not Microns.. I'm human... That simple...)) E. Metzler (UEC)Duke of Brookshire"Never use a BOO/\/\ist as a diplomat" -- GSClicky Clicky..., Tiss for your own good ya know.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by UEC »

I once, as a child, had a globe of the night sky... (and the earth, and the moon...can you tell I was a dork early on?)One thing about the night sky.. they will be distorted as they are represented right now... I know this may be harder.. but if you could design a sphere first.. and put the stars onto that. THAN make a 2d representation... it would proly come out more accurate.Use a 3d modeling program to make a sphere, than put stars on that.. What that would do would give an inverted view of the sky that we see from the world. And conceptionally the world would be inside that sphere, so we see the sky as it is seen form the ground, just inverted... So in theory.. if you poked hole in the Sky Globe... and had a light in it.. and put it in the center of a dark room.. it would cast stars(light) on the walls(black) and depict the sky as it would be seen from the ground... E. Metzler (UEC)Duke of Brookshire"Never use a BOO/\/\ist as a diplomat" -- GSClicky Clicky..., Tiss for your own good ya know.Edited by: UEC  at: 11/14/05 13:11

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Fax Celestis »

That would require some 3d imaging software that I don't think any of us have at this point.I'm working with what I've got. If you can give me something more, I'll create the spherical maps. Viatax Sitadi Axdivijink Regigoraauk

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Shyriath »

I'm going to try reinstalling MojoWorld at some point and seeing what I can do with it. ...For those who don't know, MojoWorld is a program for planet creation, which I bought way back when I had money. It's an extremely nifty program meant for generating fractal worlds... and I mean whole worlds, entire planets. But of course, every planet needs a sky, so you can also generate things like starfields... and because the starfield is generated around the entire planet, it should be a sphere like the kind Erik is talking about.The problem is, I don't know of a particular way to use the starfields outside MojoWorld, because I think they're in the form of files specific to that program. (I could be wrong about that, though.) So I don't know if it's possible to translate that into a useable star map for our purposes.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by UEC »

hmmm... no gif exporting? No 2Ding...? E. Metzler (UEC)Duke of Brookshire"Never use a BOO/\/\ist as a diplomat" -- GSClicky Clicky..., Tiss for your own good ya know.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Layal1 »

Will there be a Northern and Southern view? You have peeked my curosity with this society.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Fax Celestis »

Yes, there will be two heispheres created, one seen from the north pole and one from the south. That is, if we stick with the current system. If we can, we'll see what we can do about making a spherical representation. Viatax Sitadi Axdivijink Regigoraauk

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Layal1 »

Sorry, I didn't see RicLyon's post. I like the second one. I think that's the closest to what the night sky looks like. The other one looks more like they might have nebulas. If they are clusters, they seem to have too many for a cluster, giving off the nebula appearance. But that is my opinion.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Fax Celestis »

Trial 4 (1024x1024)Trial 5 (1024x1024)Trial 6 (1024x1024)New attempts, trying something to put sort of a milky way into the sky. Viatax Sitadi Axdivijink RegigoraaukEdited by: Fax Celestis  at: 11/15/05 22:20

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Shyriath »

Quote:hmmm... no gif exporting? No 2Ding...?As far as I can determine, there are only three kinds of output one can get from MojoWorld. One exports the terrain (but not necessarily the starfield) as for use in 3D applications. One exports a 360-degree panorama for use in Quicktime. And the third one, the only one I have exprience using, is the ordinary camera function, which renders whatever current view you have of the planet and lets you save it as an image file (gif, jpg, whatever). Which is great, but there's no way to use that to create a full map of the sky... at least, not without taking pictures of the sky from different points all around the planet, and even then, they'd all have to be stitched together somehow. It would take a million years to render enough images for that.It's sucky, I know... but then, most people who get MojoWorld and make planets with it aren't in it for the astronomy, so I suppose it's to be expected....As for the new trials: spiffy. I especially like 4... I think is captures the Milky-Way-ness better than the other two, although 5 would also be good if we wanted to go for something more subtle.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Layal1 »

I must say, I like four. It gives off the impression that their is a nice nebula close to the system. Plus, to the bottom, there is a group of stars that looks like a distant galaxy. Maybe our galaxy has a small neighbour like how Earth's galaxy does? Well, done. Very nice job. *thumbs up!*

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Ari Rahikkala
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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Ari Rahikkala »

I didn't understand what Erik meant with his planetarium idea, so I took the easy way out and wrote a little program to convert these sky images into randomised three-dimensional starmaps for Celestia. It might take a little guesswork to figure out how to replace Celestia's normal starmap with this one, and due to lack of time I only did it on my box, so some other brave hacker will have to provide detailed instructions on how to do it on a Windows box. There's documentation on how to make Celestia add-ons at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celesti ... intro.html, you should try to make that work at first (i.e. so that Celestia will load the stars out of the example file you unpacked out of bill3000.hypermart.net/Ari/Trial1-with-sol.stc.bz2). Then, to make Celestia forget its normal stars, I commented out everything before "User interface files" in celestia.cfg *except* the line with StarNameDatabase, without which Celestia apparently didn't want to work. If you don't want useless names polluting your space, replace starnames.dat with a file with one line saying only "0:Sol" (the reference to Sol apparently needs to be there for Celestia to start up in a nice way).The program is rather simple-minded in some respects (for instance, it assumes that every pixel that's not fullblack or transparent is a star, separate from all the other stars), and some of the calculations might be a bit broken (I'm rather suspicious about what I'm really doing to absolute_magnitude when I claim to be tweaking it with a random factor). Also, the magic numbers peppered throughout the calculations have received only minimal tuning, which is why the program currently creates way too many blue supergiants - however, anyone with a C++ compiler and Magick++ should be able to make changes to said numbers. As a little exercise which *should* turn out to be very simple (no, I haven't tried it) you could try extending the program to also create a starmap for the other side of the sky (i.e. with negative declinations). If you feel up to it you could investigate the cause of the black crease in the sky at the vernal equinox (i.e. where right_angle is almost or exactly 0).Celestia is a very fine piece of software, and it can model much more than just stars. For instance, you can create rather beautiful solar systems with it, complete with arbitrary satellites (which aren't limited to being planets - you can create objects for Celestia's space with most 3d modelling software out there). If you guys think micronational astronomy has promise... I recommend Celestia as a platform for the miracles of space you'll want to create. The league of sadistic telepaths: "There's someone in your head and it's not you"Edited by: Ari Rahikkala at: 11/23/05 7:35

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Kaiseress Semisa I
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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Kaiseress Semisa I »

Sweeet. Thank you Ari!

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Layal1 »

I wish I could understand it enough to get it to work. Me am dumb.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by UEC »

I guess next time I boot to linux and have time I can examine the code... E. Metzler (UEC)Duke of Brookshire"Never use a BOO/\/\ist as a diplomat" -- GSClicky Clicky..., Tiss for your own good ya know.

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Ari Rahikkala
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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by Ari Rahikkala »

http://www.lyseo.edu.ouka.fi/~lighten/s ... a.cppThere, now it should actually do most of what it was supposed to do from the start...Oh, and for the brave Windows user with even only a little Unix experience (someone like Moose should apply, at least if he can ask for help from Erik), here's what I think you should do to be able to use this program with Cygwin:- check the package gcc-g++ (a development tool) in Cygwin's installer's package chooser if it isn't already checked by default- download http://www.imagemagick.org/download/bin ... win.tar.gz to the root directory of your Cygwin (where you can see all these directories named things like "bin", "usr", "sbin", "lib", "home", etc.), execute "tar --strip-components=1 -xzf ImageMagick-i686-pc-cygwin.tar.gz" in the same directory ("cd /" to get there) - just using the ImageMagick package that comes with Cygwin isn't enough, you can't compile software against it- it should be enough to compile the program to say "g++ sky-to-celestia.cpp -lMagick++ -o sky-to-celestia"- to use it, execute "./sky-to-celestia -o Trial1.stc Trial1.png Trial1.png" (the argument after -o specifies what file to put the star catalog in, the other two arguments are the images of the two halves of the sky to process)- if you've done the tweaks to Celestia's configuration files that I listed before and you now add Trial1.stc to an addon directory you've made for it, you'll also want to create in the same diretory a file named Aton.stc containing this:0 "Aton" { RA 0 Dec 0 Distance 0.00326167 SpectralType "G2" AppMag -27} The league of sadistic telepaths: "There's someone in your head and it's not you"

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by UEC »

went to configure celestia... but I don't tihnk my RHL9 system has the gnome is wants.... I guess I'de have to finally get FC4 up and running.. but I'm to tire/inebriated right now to be able to do that... So no luck here for now... E. Metzler (UEC)Duke of Brookshire"Never use a BOO/\/\ist as a diplomat" -- GSClicky Clicky..., Tiss for your own good ya know.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by UEC »

nervermind.. I used the --with-glut option instead.. now it's compiling.. E. Metzler (UEC)Duke of Brookshire"Never use a BOO/\/\ist as a diplomat" -- GSClicky Clicky..., Tiss for your own good ya know.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by UEC »

compiled and installed.... now.. to run it.. err... wherer is that command...tomarrow.. E. Metzler (UEC)Duke of Brookshire"Never use a BOO/\/\ist as a diplomat" -- GSClicky Clicky..., Tiss for your own good ya know.

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Re: The Sky (Well, A Few Trials At Such At Least)

Post by UEC »

wow... Celestia was coool... it has crap documentation.... and I can't figure the controls out... but that's ok. E. Metzler (UEC)Duke of Brookshire"Never use a BOO/\/\ist as a diplomat" -- GSClicky Clicky..., Tiss for your own good ya know.

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