Suggestion: Planetary and Atmospherical View

[Thot]

Hey Dan,

Thinking about new cool features for Universe Sandbox I got a wonderful idea. Actually there are two things my thougts were orbiting around^^

1. Locking the view to a specific point on a planet:

By that I mean a "normal" view, from the planets surface to the stars. With that view on would be able to watch the rising of stars, moons and other planets. Especially for me this would be wonderful, because I want to look after moonphases and the sunrises of my fictional starsystem.

2. An atmospheric shader:

This feature I enjoyed very well in Stellarium: the possibility to enable a simulated atmosphere. I think this feature is related to the planned one, that stars should really emmit lights.  If there also would be really spectral classes, on would also be able to look after the apparently brightness of the central star on the sky.



By use of these features elementary questions could be answered, like:

Is my stars luminosity big enough to make the planets sky appear in blue?

Is/are my moon/s too far away to can be seen on the planets sky? (Here also the apparently size of moons should considered, because as you surely know we are seeing our moon much bigger than it actually is. This effect is related to the position of the moon over the horizon and a false understandment of distance to it. Surely this is quite a simple equation to add.)

How lunar eclipses do look from the planets surface?
.
.
.

I am sure that there are a lot of questions wich could also be answered by this feature. However, this would be wonderful and I hope quite easy to do.

What do you all think about that? Dan, is this complicated to realize?

[FGFG]

This feature will be nice ( 2 ) , but i think it is difficult to realize (expecially the lunar distorsion). I suppose that it will be also quite hard for the cpu (i'm downloading "Stellarium" right now and the screenshot are pretty cool )

The first, that you have already suggest if i remember well , wouldn't be such difficult like the 2.

[atomic7732]

...
Is my stars luminosity big enough to make the planets sky appear in blue?

....

Those are awesome but, the luminosty has nothing to do with BLUE. It is the way it reflect by HOW THICK the atmosphere is, and it COMPONENTS.

[Thot]

I know that. By that I meant an earthlike atmosphere consisting mainly up of O₂, O₃, N and all of these other gases wich are there in a really small concentration.
And related to that it has something to do with the "blueness" of the planets sky. Because if the sun isnt bright enough the saturation of the blue wont be as beautiful as on earth. The sky would have a dirty bluetone or will be completely black, like it is at night or in the late dawn.

Surely there also could be another feature added wich lets one control the atmospherical components and its thickness, but I think for the first step an earthlike atmosphere on all planets would be enough.

(btw: Would be really cool to have venus' atmosphere or even mars' as kind of presets in Universe Sandbox in the future.)

[FGFG]

I think it would be easier to create a new version of Universe Sandbox with an engine useful for this ... (for a surface view is needed a very high precision)

However i'm not a programmer and i don't know how the engine of US works

[HallowedError]

I'm thinking it might be an extension of US. Simulate something in US and then export to the atmosphere program.

[Thot]

Yes would be possible, but the basic view from the planets surface to the sky(1st mentioned feature), would be possible in universe sandbox itself, so I think.

[atomic7732]

Maybe you could chose how far the star and its planets and stuff is from Earth and choose RA and Dec in a menu in the program, and then it would calculate what constellation it would be in and show the constellations from that star! And connect the stars to the same constellation they belong but have them in "reference" to your star, so they would look different and not elongated.

[Dan Dixon]

Thot:

These are interesting ideas. I like them.

1-
It would be fairly trivial to lock one's view to a body's surface. Although picking the specific point to view from and constructing the interface would be a minor project.

2-
I haven't really done any work with 'realistic' brightnesses of stars or planets and adding a variable atmosphere sounds complicated.


You can press 'Q' or press the 'Size' button in the View panel to toggle realistic sizes of bodies on and off. This can help you to know if the bodies might actually be visible or not.

All things are possible, and it wouldn't require a new version in order to add these features, but I have to weight my available time against the prioritization of other features and bug fixes.

FGFG mentions that high precision is needed and this is something that Universe Sandbox lacks. The orientation of the axis and rotation of the planets are representative, but not accurate. Even if I added feature a look from feature you wouldn't be able to see what the sky looked like from London on October 20.

[FGFG]

First of all: nice to read this 

then...

You can press 'Q' or press the 'Size' button in the View panel to toggle realistic sizes of bodies on and off. This can help you to know if the bodies might actually be visible or not.

It helps, but it isn't very useful at high distances: in fact when the body is smaller than a pixel it desappears.

FGFG mentions that high precision is needed and this is something that Universe Sandbox lacks.
...
Even if I added feature a look from feature you wouldn't be able to see what the sky looked like from London on October 20.

Well, I didn't say the "time" precision: i meant the position precision (see again this MMO they are developing www.infinity-universe.com : they told that for a camera stabile enough on the surface of a procedural generated planet, so at the height of a man on a 12000km large planet and over, double dates are needed, instead of simple float [programming notions]). Actually i don't know if this precision is needed in universe sandbox to make this feauture (this is the reason i tought that to make this feauture alive a new version would be needed )

Hope you have understood

[avadod]

i think you should do it and you should do something like clesista or something .like looking into the future and stuff like you look at our sun grow in the solar system