You are here: zombofant.netSeptember 2012SoCiS: A Sun and an eclipses plugin for MarbleSoCiS: A Sun and an eclipses plugin for Marbleposted on September 13, 9:15, 2012 UTC by René KüttnerTable of contents A Sun in MarbleThe Eclipses PluginA Sun in Marble¶ While working on my ESA Summer of Code in Space 2012 project, I am also implementing some interesting side tasks. Some of these tasks come up as requirements for my main goals while others are just “nice to have”. One of the latter tasks, that have no direct relation to the satellites or eclipses (see below) plugins, was adding the Sun to the stars plugin. This is the result:The above screenshot shows how the Sun looks like when using the latest stars plugin in Marble Virtual Globe. Since the plugin is restricted to the Earth at the moment, the Sun is displayed only for the Earth as well. However, adapting the stars plugin for other planets (inclination and equinox direction) is already on my TODO list.The Eclipses Plugin¶ The satellites plugin does now support planetary satellites and user defined satellite data sources. It has thus reached a state where I can go on to the other big goal of my SoCiS project: the creation of an eclipse visualization and planning plugin.It will inform users about upcoming solar eclipse events and will be capable of presenting useful pieces of information to help planning eclipse journeys, for example. It will also visualize solar eclipses by showing shadow cones and sun boundaries according to a particular location on Earth. Gerhard Holtkamp contributed a lot of useful code allowing me to concentrate on the coding part. This is how it may look like:The screenshot shows a visualization of the annular solar eclipse that took place on January 21 2012. The shadow cones (blue: full penumbra, magenta: 60% magnitude penumbra) are calculated according to the position of the eclipse’s maximum (marked on the gray central line). Using the maximum’s location will be the default behavior if no observation point (or home location) is set by the user. The brown line in the south visualizes the southern boundary of the Sun while the brown areas on the northern hemisphere show the sunrise and sunset boundaries respectively.The user will also be able to configure when the plugin should inform him or her about upcoming eclipse events. For example, he or she wants to be informed only about events visible from a certain location or eclipses of a certain type (annular, total, etc.) And, of course, there will be a user interface to browse future or past eclipses. But more on this in my next weblog posting.tags:esasocis2012marblekdeprevious:SoCiS: User defined data sources for satellites in Marblenext:An approach to computational spatial hearing