Kstars, Celestia or Stellarium on the Raspberry Pi?

[karrika]

I would like to try out mapping the sky as seen through a camera with the known celestial bodies.

I already got a Pi 2 with a 160° PiNoir camera and a stepper.

Suggestions of which package to start with out of the available candidates? Does one of these run well on Raspberry Pi?
- kstars
- celestia
- stellarium

[steveb4pi]

Stellarium == can be made to 'work', however it seems to have problems with Pi OpenGL, reverting to CPU rendering which makes it virtually unusable (takes 100s to refresh the screen)
Kstars == has been used OK (refresh approx 1s) except the GUI for 'select a star' (goto) takes 6-8seconds to open ... see here http://drmistry.co.uk/world-of-pi.aspx and
http://knro.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/remo ... ry-pi.html and ESPECIALLY here
http://www.cloudynights.com/topic/50326 ... starsindi/
Celestia = can't say, I'm still trying to track it down for Pi
Cartes du Ciel == again, no idea ..
Copernicus === new nane for some ancient sky mapping s/w, might be usable
XEphem == 'serious' skymap, source is available, have seen reports that it works on the Pi, see
http://www.drmistry.co.uk/installing-xe ... ry-pi.aspx

Heres some stuff on getting INDI to work
http://indilib.org/support/tutorials/13 ... ry-pi.html

Do update if you manage to get anything working ...

[karrika]

Thank you for the link. This XEphem seems to be the way to go on the Pi.

I only need the projected clearly visible stars, moon, sun in polar coordinates. The idea is just to map the results to a camera view of the sky. What I am really aiming for is to verify the GPS position and heading based on the stars, beacons and landmarks. Pretty much everything you can see through the camera lens. So it is to take one step back in time and dig up the chronometer and the sextant

This is just for fun. I love sailing. And I always turn GPS off and use paper charts and a compass.

Celestial navigation is something I have never learned to do. And now as both cameras and Raspberries are cheap it is the time to start learning something new.

I hope to run opencv for image analysis. Time will tell if it works well enough.

[gzotti]

FYI, I got Stellarium to run on the Pi2. You have to activate the new OpenGL drivers and build from sources. 8-12fps are quite OK. And the Navigational Stars plugin mark widely used reference stars.

viewtopic.php?p=940731#p940731

Clear Skies,
Georg (Stellarium team)

[karrika]

Navigational stars plugin?

Sounds exactly what I have been looking for. I already have a Pi 3 and a wide angle IR camera module.

Thank you

[SpatialProf]

I'm very keen to hear if you've had any success?

I also had the idea of using a Pi with a NoIR camera to establish location in a situation where GPS isn't an option (long story!). The setup would be stationary and I imagined using 5 minute exposures to image star trails. Does anyone know if this is possible? If so, how precise and accurate might it be (e.g. in arc seconds or metres)?

[karrika]

I am only scraching the surface. Stars alone give an accuracy about 1NM. But my idea is to combine this with known landmarks which makes it a bit more demanding. What I found out is that there seems to be a set of stars that were called Navstars. Bright enough to be seen.
I did get a 120 degrr IR module. But there is also cool vandal proof cameras that are outdoor capable.
Then we have the sun. It is very bright in daytime. Can direct sunlight ruin the image?
I would like to measure the direction of the sun. The old sailors used a rock on a foggy day to see where the sun is. It must have been some kind of polarizing filter effect.
Then we have the list of lights used for terrestrial navigation. It couls be used also.

My interest is mainly terrestrial navigation at sea. Having something like this on board would be a great backup for times when the GPS is down.

[bramvl]

This is my first visit to this forum.
Like @karrika I am also a sailor and use gps location but also tried to use the sextant to do celestial navigation. Due to age I have a tremor so the sextant is impossible for me.
In an article I read about Raspberry Sense Hat containing a gyroscope and an acceleration sensor with which you could, maybe, fix a camera on the horizon and measure the angle of a celestial body. Is this a sensible approach or has somebody a better idea to have celestial navigation with raspberry stuff?