Planetarium get coordinates of view center

[Niccolò Coli]

Currently in Framing Assistant it is only possible to get the coordinates from planetarium if an object is selected.

Suggestion is to add an option to get coordinates of the planetarium view center (it could be an icon in framing assistant or an option in planetarium option tab)

For stellarium:

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If you combine information given in the User Guide (section 12.7.3) with the information from the website given above, you may come to a command line like:

curl -G -d 'coord=jNow&ref=false' http://localhost:8090/api/main/view

which returns a JSON with a 3-vector for equatorial coordinates in the current epoch. Replacing jNow by j2000 would yield equatorial coordinates in the J2000.0 reference frame. Replacing jNow by altAz would yield altAzimuthal coordinates, but you don't need those. Further quoting that website:

The returned values are 3D vectors.
x= cos(δ)_cos(α)
y= cos(δ)_sin(α)
z= sin(δ)

Which indicates that these X/Y/Z are Cartesian elements of a unit vector pointing to (alpha/delta). Converting into the angles is left as an exercise.

All of this of course requires to activate and run the RemoteControl plugin.

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[/quote]

[Ron Kramer]

I created a issue - similar - just found this. I’d be happy with any CLICKED coordinate being passed in. As it is now it seems to be a primary object clicked. Even better shoot a sub and CLICK IN IT and say “center here”. ah la- SGP does.

[Daniel Beetsma]

“ Currently in Framing Assistant it is only possible to get the coordinates from planetarium if an object is selected.”

I would like to correct this statement: “ Currently […] to get the coordinates from planetarium if an named/known object is selected.”

Selecting Vega and clicking the button works fine. It’s what Ron Kramer says really: it needs to be a “primary” object.
Selecting just about any other no-name star results in an error “Unable to acquire coordinates from Stellarium”.

This is, I guess, only partially working as intended: because in a huge amount of cases, the button does not acquire the coordinates from the planetarium.

[Ron Kramer]

This makes it very hard to compose the frame as desired. For example if we’re shooting a wide FOV and say we want to include the HEART and SOUL nebula’s in the same frame. It should be easy to pick any star point between the two to frame on both. But this isn’t allowed unless there is some primary target or star between the HEART and SOUL.
Same for shooting the IRIS and hoping to include the GHOST in the frame (whicih should be easily possible). Except it won’t let us pick a star and center between the two targets we’d like to frame.

I find I’m limited and restricted by this pretty much every night. If shooting something large like the North American and Pelican areas. If we want to compose for ONE AREA specifically… again we can’t unless there is a primary star or target in the center of our frame. And there RARELY is.

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[Aaron Dalton]

At least in Stellarium is there an ability to create a custom user object at the framing center?

[Stefan B]

Nightly 30 will have a fallback for stellarium when nothing is selected, that it will take the current view’s center