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Tuesday 18 December 2007

In-World Planisphere

A while ago when I was making my first HUD, which is now available for free on in my Astro-Park Sky-platform. As part of the HUD features, I wanted to include an SL version of a Planisphere. So what is a Planisphere? Well it’s a tool for showing you what stars are visible at a given time from a particular Latitude, and as such is a good tool for improving your understanding and appreciation of the daily and annual motion of the stars. Anyway, I did come across some design issues, trying to make a HUD version as well as discovering a superb web based Flash version, that you can find at http://www.open2.net/science/finalfrontier/planisphere/frames.html and I decided to include this into the HUD instead.



I still felt however that it would be good idea though to have an SL version, and so last evening I had another go. I found suitable free star chart and cover templates on the net and after making a few modifications mainly for accessibility and readability, I uploaded them to SL. It was then simply a case of rezzing shaping and texturizing two cylinders. Once in place and scaled, I set about putting together a rotation script. At the moment you will find that by touching the outer white ring, the chart rotates in 5 degree jumps, so about five days each time. The latitude setting for the original star chart is 50o North, which on the face plate I have stated is Northern Europe, but of course that includes all countries around the globe that fall within that particular celestial co-ordinate. I have checked the Planisphere against one of the handheld variety of my own, and it seems to work pretty well. So next time you are passing Shimmer Island, why not Teleport up to the Astro-Park and give it a try, feedback welcome

Bye for now, Skipper











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