We had some discussions on our public forum recently about using the stars and the planets for guidance and navigation on the lunar surface. Of course, it raises the question of how the sky looks like on the Moon? To find out, I took a virtual trip to the Apollo 11, 15 and Surveyor 7 landing sites using the free open source Stellarium software. Stellarium is a complete planetarium software for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It even allows you to look at the sky from surface of other planets and moons.
Other free software used in producing this video was the Gimp for image manipulations and Kdenlive for non-linear video editing. Thus, the video was created using only free open source software including the OS, which was Ubuntu linux.
You can also watch the video in higher resolution on the YouTube page.
PS: I have hidden a small error in the first 20 seconds of the video, and I am not thinking about the lunar landscape. The first person to identify this error will receive a free Team FREDNET mission patch :-)
Congrats to Pierre, but what happened to MY post about the landscape being fake and that you used the same one for both Apollo 11 and 15 in your video? That's an error too. You're not going to get an error like that by me! (especially not with Apollo 15) HaHa
I haven't seen any other posts than the one from Pierre, sorry. You are absolutely right that the landscape is fake; I didn't want to spend too much time on that part. I wanted to focus on what is up in the sky rather than what's on the surface. Maybe we can improve it for the next version ;-)
Sweet video, congrats to Frednet!! And the music is just great with it!
oh and...I kind of see a shooting star at 12sec into the video, but not atmosphere on the Moon means no shooting stars seen from the lunar surface (too bad though, because the viewing would be great!!)
Does this make me eligible for a Frednet patch ?? ;-)
You were very fast and indeed, the error is the shooting star. So, the free patch is yours! Send me an address where I can ship it to, either by PM or email alex.csete at teamfrednet.org
What??
Congrats to Pierre, but what happened to MY post about the landscape being fake and that you used the same one for both Apollo 11 and 15 in your video? That's an error too. You're not going to get an error like that by me! (especially not with Apollo 15) HaHa
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I haven't seen any other
I haven't seen any other posts than the one from Pierre, sorry. You are absolutely right that the landscape is fake; I didn't want to spend too much time on that part. I wanted to focus on what is up in the sky rather than what's on the surface. Maybe we can improve it for the next version ;-)
Small Error...
Sweet video, congrats to Frednet!! And the music is just great with it!
oh and...I kind of see a shooting star at 12sec into the video, but not atmosphere on the Moon means no shooting stars seen from the lunar surface (too bad though, because the viewing would be great!!)
Does this make me eligible for a Frednet patch ?? ;-)
Re: Small Error...
You were very fast and indeed, the error is the shooting star. So, the free patch is yours! Send me an address where I can ship it to, either by PM or email alex.csete at teamfrednet.org
Source video
I have also made the source video available here:
http://files.oz9aec.net/video/LunarSky-360_30_15-50k.avi
WARNING: 180 Mbytes