Hey folks. For those who wish to make high quality equirectangular images for spherical projection terrain maps. Check out the free open source program Hugin .

Good point Rob,

Technically this new feature belongs in Kstars proper, NOT in Ekos. It changes the star map visualization and (so far) has no effect whatsoever in Ekos. In a future version the Ekos Scheduler will know about the artificial horizon, but for now the whole thing really ought to live in Kstars.

Hey all. I thought I might get a little performance boost if the images contained fewer colours. So I created these versions with only 32 indexed colours. The file size was nearly halved, with an acceptable amount of lost quality.
I think it helped while panning the sky a little. But it's subtle, but that may just be subjective bias.
Please comment on your experience with them.

I'm very happy with the new terrain feature in Ekos. It's especially handy that I can easily capture a photosphere of my back yard in the iOS "Google Street View" app and then import it into KStars.

Now I'd like to repeat this for my favorite dark site. The trouble is that there's absolutely no internet access up there (no mobile phone service). 

Does anybody know of a way to use iOS Google Street View or any similar app without access to the internet?

Scott, Not sure on IPhone, but if you can access an Android phone with the Google photo app, that works offline.

How do we get these two images into kstars…?
It’s a great idea as I tried the current ones and they are laggy when using a 2k monitor and Kstars running on the rpi over VNC, also I can’t use the HIPS overlay images at all, they are totally unusable like this….so would be nice at least to use these terrain images

Hy, Thank you!

Sure enough, I put my iPhone on airplane mode and Google Street View still process the photosphere.

Scott

So I knew the virtual terrain feature was going to be incredibly useful with my horizon. But I never expected it to be so much fun.
As someone who is pretty new to astronomy, this feature really helps fill in the gaps between looking at sky charts and looking up.
Thank you!

 

@astronerd:  You asked:
            How do we get these two images into kstars…?
Sorry, I'm a bit out-of-context. Do you mean the two Mars sample terrain images I prepared?
If so, they are available in the "download extra data" part of the KStars "startup wizard", which can be found in the  KStars "Settings" menu. 


 

@Hy
No the two images posted that are a much smaller file size that have been posted earlier, by Andrew,  as the two you mention are too big in file size and cause bad lag when using over VNC with a 2k monitor….I can’t use the HIPS overlay either as it just slows it all down to a crawl…..I just wish there ws a better VNC out there that would work well with 2k and 4k monitors…..

FWIW, you can take either of my two Mars PNG files, or any other PNG compatible with terrain, including one of your own environment, and change its resolution using Photoshop (or I imagine many other photo processing apps) keeping the aspect ratio unchanged, and then output as PNG. I believe it would still work with terrain.

@Hy
yes I get that, so back to my original question, if I have an image file I want to add to Kstars, how do I add it manually…..????