Stellarium scripting engine

April 3, 2020

Citizen science images of aurora and celestial features can often be noisy. Additionally, consumer and even prosumer cameras manipulate images in ways that typically cannot be completely disabled or even easily quantified in all cases. To make scientific use of images, the image metadata must include:

• Geographic coordinates (e.g. from GPS)
• time of image (accuracy ~ 10 seconds for wide angle view, ~ 1 second with < 20 degree FOV).

Stellarium helps manual verification of image calibration. Stellarium can also be used from the web browser without needing any install or plugins. F11 toggles full screen mode.

Press F12 to toggle Stellarium “scripts” menu.

Stellarium can use ECMAScript, which is like a generalized, formal JavaScript. Scripts have a .ssc or .inc filename extension.

We provide several example Stellarium scripts.