Simulated Sky

Abstract

For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of the starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive sky simulator of the twentieth century, the optomechanical planetarium, provided new ways for representing and teaching about the sky, but the high construction and running costs meant that they have not become common. However, in recent decades, “desktop planetarium programs” running on personal computers have gained wide attention. Modern incarnations are immensely versatile tools, mostly targeted towards the community of amateur astronomers and for knowledge transfer in transdisciplinary research. Cultural astronomers also value the possibilities they give of simulating the skies of past times or other cultures. With this paper, we provide an extended presentation of the open-source project Stellarium, which in the last few years has been enriched with capabilities for cultural astronomy research not found in similar, commercial alternatives.

The network signature of constellation line figures

“…Vanuatu (6) present Western (88) present Western ast. (53) present Yellowknives (2) present Zuni (9) 20th c. To answer the question of semantic universality, we use data from 75 astronomical cultures (Figures 2) for which 1903 constellation line figures were documented (with at least some degree of certainty) in existing ethnographic, anthropological, or (archeo)astronomical literature.…”

“…The dataset consists of constellation line figures from astronomical cultures worldwide. Just under half of the cultures had been contributed by members of the public to the astronomy software Stellarium [88]; we use this Stellarium data after validating it against existing scholarly sources, and verifying that the license allows research use. The remaining half of the cultures were digitised by the author from scholarly sources; of these, some supplement existing Stellarium cultures.…”

Babylonian records of transient astronomical phenomena

“…In the following analysis, we occasionally make us of computed stellar, planetary, and lunar positions. These computations have been made using the open-access planetarium software Stellarium (Zotti et al 2021) and the NASA Horizons online ephemeris (https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/ app.html#/), whose accuracy is sufficient for our purposes.…”

Teaching introductory astronomy using virtual observations

“…This work has utilized Stellarium Web -the online planetarium run in a web browser, originally created by Fabien and Guillaume Chereau, available on https://stellarium-web.org and Stellarium planetarium [19]. This work also used data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (www.cosmos.esa.int'gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, www.cosmos.esa.…”