[Kstars-devel] GSoC Idea

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi Rishab

>    Inspiration:
>    A few weeks ago, I was with a local amateur astronomers group and we were
>    discussing the recent mars opposition.
>    To explain some things, we needed a way to visualize the earth from above
>    the sun and see how the March opposition is as distant as it could be.
>    And I realized that this could be a feature for kstars.
> 
>    What I wish to implement:
>    Using the openGL backend, a way for the user to observe stars and planets
>    from:
>    1) Different elevations of the earth.
>    2) From the surface of any other planet
>    3) From any point hovering in space (not bound to any planet)
> 
>    Also, this would let me add another feature: split-screen mode
>    In split-screen mode, the user can view the universe from multiple
>    viewpoints at the same time.
>    For eg. One could see the said mars opposition hovering above the sun
>    while watching it simultaneously located on earth.

That would be excellent to have! But KStars' code is so tightly tied
to the earth, that it would be nearly impossible to implement this
without changing a whole lot of stuff (or maybe not; I could be wrong
about this).

When we use OpenGL, we are not really using the 3D capabilities. We're
using OpenGL as a 2D renderer that's faster than QPainter mostly
because of fast texture mapping etc. So it's not going to be as easy
as most OpenGL apps make it out to be.

Plus, we don't have distances to stars. That means we can move only
"locally"

But now that I think about it, it might not be very hard. It might
just amount to writing another 'projector' class, thanks to Harry's
work.

Regards
Akarsh