Cousin Ricky <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

> I just punted in despair, figuring each project might require a somewhat
> specialized solution, but I didn't notice the new thread activity until now.

Well, I think that something like the sunpos include file is mostly what I'm
looking for.

Given a longitude and latitude, a date, and an hour of the day, create a
celestial sphere.  Make it so that no matter what, each star is at least 1 pixel
wide.

I'm primarily interested in the geometry - the proper alignment.

"Look - that notch in that rock at Stonehenge really DOES line up with Rigel at
midnight on the winter solstice..."

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Aside from that, you could add some sort of mechanism that allows the _USER_ to
tweak the catalogue.

So - whatever array you use to do the basic stuff, and then maybe a user array
that modifies the values or sets some flags before rendering.


That way someone could highlight a star with an object{} (torus, [under]line,
arrow, etc), put a text label, change the apparent size, replace the simple
sphere for the star with a fancy object{}, or apply a multiplier to the star's
brightness/color.

I'd probably start with like 10 stars or a few constellations, and give it a
whirl, and then get some user feedback before doing anything bigger.

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