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Georg Zotti edited this page Jul 22, 2022 · 7 revisions

Some notes for scientists:

Astronomy Basics

Stellarium is an excellent tool for getting to know the observable sky and phenomena. It can be used to teach astronomy basics like seasons, planet loops, equation of time, celestial coordinates, drive telescopes during nights of observation, or teach about cultural astronomy, the connection of skies and landscapes of other peoples. Given the right configuration data, you can visualize historical comets, novae and supernovae. Please see the Guide for a wealth of information.

  • Since version 0.17 Stellarium can display named features on the Moon and planets.
  • Since version 0.18 Stellarium can display HiPS all-sky surveys provided online by the professional astronomical community.

Notes about Historical Application

Originally, Stellarium has been developed as beautiful simulation of the sky outdoors. Efficiency was bought a bit by omitting smaller astronomical details, which meant that early versions of Stellarium are not accurate enough for being used for critical simulations in earlier times, i.e. research in historical astronomy and archaeoastronomy.

The situation is in the process of change, and some milestones can be seen:

  • V0.12 finally introduced selectable DeltaT computations which compensate the deceleration of earth rotation.
  • V0.13 introduced the ArchaeoLines plugin for visualisation of various important declination arcs discussed in cultural astronomy.
  • V0.13.3 introduced the Scenery3D plugin for visualisation of walkable landscapes.
  • V0.14 uses an advanced model for precession and nutation.
  • V0.15 and later can use the NASA/JPL DE430/431 solutions with planetary positions for years -13,000 to +17,000.
  • V0.16.1 allows time-triggered visibility changes in 3D sceneries.
  • V0.20.3 seasons' beginnings on par with "official" sources
  • V0.21.0 Accurate planet axes (IAU WGCCRE models), e.g. Lunar rotation/Libration data, central meridians of the planets, albedo-corrected magnitudes for Mars, ...
  • V0.21.2 Aberration correction, fixing a systematic positional mismatch for the stars in the order of a few arcseconds.

We are pretty confident that Stellarium's accuracy is largely comparable to other good software, but have not done weeks of decisive critical testing. If you are able to help, feel invited to contact us.

Please see the Guide, Appendix F, for important notes and possible pitfalls to avoid in your historical research.

Desiderata

We know about some shortcomings which we would very much like to move from here to the "solved" list above:

  • Proper motion of stars does not take radial velocity into account. Also, binary stars seem to fly apart because the individual stars' proper motions are extrapolated without taking into account their orbit around a common center of gravity. Therefore, a handful of bright stars like Toliman, Sirius, Arcturus or Vega seem to have a wrong position in the remote past (or future). A new star catalog (also updated with Gaia data) and new procedures should resolve this.
  • Scenery3D only models a piece of landscape on a tangential plane. Earth curvature correction and adaptive meridian convergence correction would be required for models larger than a few km.

Further reading:

TODO: Move content from there.

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