Orrery

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In progress: This article or section documents one or more features whose implementation are in progress.

The orrery is a simple application for the openmoko platform which displays the night sky. It is nowhere near as elaborate as, for example Google Sky or xephem. It is intended to be a small application that will have a storage footprint comparable to a ringtone, or one of the games bundled with the openmoko rootfs. It requires no network connection, but does use the GPS information, by querying gpsd.

Orrery Screen Grab 1

The image above shows the default display - all stars visible to the unaided eye, with colors for the brightest ones. It's displayed with a Transverse Mercator projection (similar to Norton's Star Atlas) which works well with the VGA aspect ratio. The view can be panned around the sky by tapping the green arrows at the bottom, or the green azimuth values.

Orrery Screen Grab 2

If one taps the main display area, the program toggles into constellation mode, as shown above. In addition to constellation names and figures, the celestial equator (light yellow), ecliptic (red) and galactic plane (blue-green) are shown.

I have not yet gotten this packaged for proper distribution, but I would be extremely happy to send the files to anyone who wants to have this program. I'd of course be happiest if you made suggestions about how the program could be improved. I can be contacted at orrery.moko@gmail.com.

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In progress: This article or section documents one or more features whose implementation are in progress.

The orrery is a simple application for the openmoko platform which displays the night sky. It is nowhere near as elaborate as, for example Google Sky or xephem. It is intended to be a small application that will have a storage footprint comparable to a ringtone, or one of the games bundled with the openmoko rootfs. It requires no network connection, but does use the GPS information, by querying gpsd.

Orrery Screen Grab 1

The image above shows the default display - all stars visible to the unaided eye, with colors for the brightest ones. It's displayed with a Transverse Mercator projection (similar to Norton's Star Atlas) which works well with the VGA aspect ratio. The view can be panned around the sky by tapping the green arrows at the bottom, or the green azimuth values.

Orrery Screen Grab 2

If one taps the main display area, the program toggles into constellation mode, as shown above. In addition to constellation names and figures, the celestial equator (light yellow), ecliptic (red) and galactic plane (blue-green) are shown.

I have not yet gotten this packaged for proper distribution, but I would be extremely happy to send the files to anyone who wants to have this program. I'd of course be happiest if you made suggestions about how the program could be improved. I can be contacted at orrery.moko@gmail.com.