Night sky tool (spherical planetarium)

[GuiSousa135]

Offline spherical planetarium function within the "astronomy" tab of the application to assist the user in the identification and observation of planets, stars, constellations, satelites and other celestial bodies. In addition, extra features such as autocalibrage, gyroscope positioning/location identification, free navigation mode. A simple and open source application that adds this functionality as exemple is Sky Map.

[kylecorry31]

Hi, thank you for the suggestion.

I may consider adding some of this once #1802 is complete. I have held off on adding star positions to Trail Sense because it's very hard to spot them using just a list representation of azimuth / altitude.

Criteria for adding a star / planet:

• The star is easily visible with the naked eye and can be used for navigation (ex. Polaris)
• The star is part of a major constellation the people might want to spot while camping or could use for celestial navigation
• The planet must be easily visible with the naked eye

But I likely will not add several planets or minor stars - see #449 and #319 where I previously attempted this but backed it off due to complexity and lack of practical use for the core use cases of Trail Sense.

Stars

• Polaris
  Not finished

Constellations

• Ursa Major (Big Dipper)
  Not finished

Planets

• Mercury
• Venus
• Mars
• Jupiter
• Saturn

Other

• Sun
• Moon
• Meteor showers

[kylecorry31]

Another example app: https://github.com/tengel/AndroidPlanisphere

[GuiSousa135]

As the focus of the planetarium will be celestial navigation, the first objects to think about are the main constellations and their respective stars that are used to identify North and South, direction, time and other location parameters. We have three types of constellations: austral (southern hemisphere), boreal (northern hemisphere) and equatorial constellations, (located near the Celestial Equator) like the constellations of the zodiac. Then, the planets and visible stars of the earth: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Sun and Moon. Finally, it would be important to see some of the imaginary lines of support and reference: the terrestrial equator line, the observer's horizon line (based on the location of the cell phone and the gyroscope), perhaps latitude and longitude angle markings. The Sky Map application (also made in Kotlin) demonstrates some of these objects. Soon I will be listing here specifically the name of the stars and constellations.

[kylecorry31]

@GuiSousa135 Thanks! As for the planets, I'll probably only add Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn since the others aren't visible to the naked eye. I may start with just the stars, because I'm not too sure how important the planets are to celestial navigation (more research needed) - and they would mainly just be for people to stargaze while camping.

I'm going to start a list in my other comment, which I'll update as I get more information - I also picked up a book on navigation, which included a chapter on celestial navigation. I plan on giving that a read and seeing what it recommends for stars / constellations.