Displays the night sky
The orrery program displays the night (and day!) sky on N900 devices. It displays constellations, and other astronomical information such as moon phase calendars
| Author | Ken Young |
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John, I think the page you referenced has incorrect information. If you look at the specs on the Nokia site:
http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/specifications/
there is no mention of a digital compass. I'd be very happy to be proved wrong about this, but I don't think I am.
I guess I researched the wrong site. Why do these specs say it does have a digital compass?
http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/nokia-n900-mobile-phone-specification
Doing the "Google Sky" mode on the N900 is not possible, because it requires a digital compass, which the N900 does not have.
I just got to look at Google Sky app today and it was awesome! Are there any plans to get this to work like that, where you hold you phone up and you are basically looking at the same stars that are displayed on your phone?
Please note: Upgrading to the 3.1.3-1 version will clobber any "Private Catalog" location entries you may have made with an earlier version of this program. If you wish to prevent that, please copy the file
/home/opt/maemo/usr/share/orrery/menus/Private
to the location
/home/user/.orrery/Private
before upgrading. You will need to create the /home/user/.orrery directory first.
I confess. I know nothing about handling fonts properly. I'm reading up about pango and cairo. I'll make the fonts look better soon.
Great fun!! I agree about the font size though - difficult even with my glasses on
Feature Suggestion:
How about an "Ecliptic Map" showing the sun, moon, and highlighting the planets. This would probably work best in landscape mode, with 0H to 24H in Right Ascension along the bottom, and +/- say 50 degrees (although more may fit the screen) in Declination.
The "Sun and Moon" page would benefit from a landscape (scrolling up/down) orientation.
Love the program!!
We hate you... you made us miss the compass from n900...
Very good app :-)
If you could make it get the phone's "orientation" from GPS it would double its useability. i.e. make it get the GPS location and after a couple of steps calculate where the phone looks at. Just like the way other GPS apps show a compass.
This is a really exciting app. At the moment i am building a mechanical orrery and i hope that both orrery will bring the same result. Only the desktop logo could be a little more interesting.
Excellent work, for both the program and the documentation!
This is a great app and it's obvious that it required a lot of work. I'm not that into astronomy but this app may get me interested. I took one star off because of the font size. I wish there was a way to zoom in on some of the pages. I can't seem to read about half of the info even with reading glasses.
Yes, having a menu option that launches the opens the wiki page will definitely be in the next version. Obviously the current version needs quite a bit of "hildonizing" in order to fit in with the UI guidelines. I'm going to get at least some of that done before releasing the next version.
Wonderful! Thanks in particular for the wiki! What about a menu entry (Help or Documentation) linking to the wiki page that opens the browser with it?
Very good job, man! I love this program. You could also add other calculation habilities as in old Astronomy Lab program for Windows.
Beautiful application. Works really nice and has excellent documentation. see also the wiki: http://wiki.maemo.org/Orrery
There is pretty complete documentation here:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Orrery
Needs a help screen. I somehow got into a pan/zoom mode while touching the screen (drag a sqiggle ?), and have no idea how to get back to the normal view.
Ditto for pan left/right (it's not clear to use the bottom of the screen only).
An option for larger fonts, and normal english rather than 'azimoth' etc.
Gain a star because of the handy flash light features.
Helpful application with a lot of interesting information. Would it be possible for you to increase the font size, or is there some built in way to increase font size? It's so small that it is very hard to read. Also, it would be helpful for some explanation of what is meant by "deep sky observatories". Does this mean Hubble, etc.? Thanks!
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Excellent!!!