Feature Skyculture ; Statement of need

[ginimod]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

For an ethno-astronomy project based on Stellarium's SkyCultures and external sources, I would like to create maps of the asterisms I'm working on. My project is to document asterisms that aren't necessarily already in Stellarium.

I'm documenting them in Stellarium's JSON format.

Describe the solution you'd like

I read that this feature was in the roadmap, but I don't know which direction you've taken.

Ideally, I'd like to have at least two databases:

• legacy for the sky.db database
• user for the custom database
  and be able to query the database by domain, like ['legacy','user'] or ['user']

and have an author script to inject data from the Stellarium SkyCulture JSON format.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I'm working directly in Stellarium, but the maps produced with Starplot are much classier for producing documentation

[steveberardi]

I'm in the process of adding documented support for custom catalogs (including constellations / sky cultures), so it'll be part of the next release (v0.18) which will hopefully be out by the end of the year.

The custom catalogs will work similar to how you described in your post: you'll basically create a separate database / parquet file (Starplot will have some built-in helpers for doing this). And then you'll specify the catalog when plotting stuff (e.g. stars, constellations, etc).

Hope that fits your project's timeline too! Appreciate your patience.

In the meantime, there is a very manual way of plotting different sky cultures: every plot type has a line function, so you could query the constellation stars by HIP and then plot the lines that way, example pseudocode (untested):

stars = Star.find(where=[_.hip.isin(your_list_of_hip_ids)])
stars_by_hip = {s.hip: s for s in stars}

for constellation in constellations:
  for hip1, hip2 in constellation:
    s1 = stars_by_hip[hip1]
    s2 = stars_by_hip[hip2]
    p.line(
      [(s1.ra, s1.dec), (s2.dec, s2.dec)]
    )

In the above, constellations would be a list of constellations, where each constellation would be a list of 2-tuples (representing the lines between stars by their HIP ids).

[ginimod]

It worked great for me.

I had to find the frame in Stellarium to adjust the map and add it to my JSON file.

Oh yeah, I also replaced my MongoDB database for the stars with Star in the library, one less dependency and more flexibility.

I'll obviously credit you in the publication and send you the link so you can see what we're doing with your work.

Thanks for your work.

[steveberardi]

Great to hear! And I'd love to see any publication you create with Starplot - thanks!