[Marble-devel] SOCiS 2013 application: Displaying Solar / Lunar Eclipses in Marble

[Dizhi Zhou]

Dear Torsten Rahn and Rene Kuettner,

I'm an amateur astronomer and a skilled C++ programmer. Currently, I'm 
in my 3ed year of Ph.D. study in the faculty of computer science, 
University of New Brunswick, Canada. In addition, I was the chair of 
astronomy association in my former university in China. Therefore, I 
believe I match the requirement of SOCIS projects in Marble very 
well:)   You can find my personal introduction in the end of this email.

I'm very interested in the "Displaying Solar / Lunar Eclipses in Marble" 
project in SOCIS 2013. Based on the expected results part, I think the 
work of this project can be divided into following parts

1. Build a database to store the basic information of eclipses. Those 
basic information can be obtained from NASA Eclipse Website.

2. When user search for the specific eclipse, Marble can visualize the 
track of eclipse in the Marble's map. The information which are needed 
here can be calculated based on the basic information in database. The 
calculation method can refer to Gerhard Holtkamp's code (where can I 
download it).

3. Prepare trip: I'm not sure the details of this function. But I have 
some rough ideas on this:
                   If user's home address IS NOT in eclipse area, Marble 
can show the route from user's home address to the closest place where 
can see the eclipse.
                   If user's home address IS in the eclipse area, Marble 
can show the route from user's home address to the closest place where 
can see the partial/total lunar, partial/annular/total solar.

Would you mind to give me some comments on above steps?

Currently, I'm doing the following work to get familiar with the coding 
in Marble. I try to implement a simple plugin before I submit the proposal.
1, Compile the Marble in my Linux PC,
Links:
http://marble.kde.org/sources.php

2, Try to run the C++ sample code of Marble library.
Links:
http://marble.kde.org/dev-intro.php
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Marble/MarbleCPlusPlus
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdeedu/marble/repository/revisions/master/show/examples/cpp

Do you have any other resources which may help me on this project?

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Looking 
forward to your reply.

Regards
Dizhi

/*********************About me*******************************/
I'm in my 3ed year of Ph.D. study in the faculty of computer science, 
University of New Brunswick, Canada. My research area is the wireless 
network simulations. I use C++ for many years in both of academic and 
industrial projects. You can find my c++ project experience below:

2008 - present:  Using network simulator 2 (NS-2) and network simulator 
3 (NS-3) in my research projects by using C++.

2011.05 - 2011.08 (4 months): Google Summer of Code 2012, using C++ to 
implement several 4G packet scheduler modules in NS-3.

If you want to know more about me, please visit my personal website: 
www.cs.unb.ca/~q5frc/


-- 
Ph.D. Candidate
Faculty of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick
540 Windsor Street
Fredericton,New Brunswick,Canada
E3B 5A3

E. q5frc at unb.ca
Homepage: www.cs.unb.ca/~q5frc/

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