[QGIS-Developer] Earth, Sun, Moon & Planets Plugin

[Tim Sutton]

Hi

Wow that looks beautiful! A couple of thoughts:

1) Rather than implementing your own slider logic I wonder if you could
hook in to the temporal controller?
2) For platform specific components the normal practice is to a)
communicate with the plugins reviewers about why this is needed so that
they don't pre-emptively reject your plugin and b) normally pull down the
platform specific components as a post install step. I expect you will get
some resistance to adding a new dependency to QGIS core unless that
dependency is broadly useful, but you may be able to convince Jurgen and
Peter to bundle it into the Windows and macOS installers respectively.
3) For that 100mb blob, similar to our discussion on the timezone work you
were doing, the preferred approach would be to fetch it as a post-install
download the first time you use the plugin.

Thanks for making such interesting plugins!

Regards

Tim

On Fri, Jun 4, 2021 at 3:01 PM C Hamilton <adenaculture at gmail.com> wrote:

> I want to give you a heads up that I am working on a plugin to display the
> position of the sun and moon at their zenith (directly overhead) as well as
> the day/night boundary for a particular date and time.  I could easily
> include the planets as well. So far the plugin can display the region of
> civil twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight, and night. This
> is what I have so far. You can see the sun, moon, and day/night boundaries.
> The plugin automatically styles it as shown and the algorithms are
> processing algorithms.
>
> [image: earthsunmoon.jpg]
>
> My next step will be to have an interactive interface that will display
> the above but with a 24 hour time slider that will dynamically change these
> plots as the time slider is moved. Also the ability to click on the map and
> have it display information about sunrise, sunset dusk, altitude and
> azimuth for both the sun and moon at that location. I may have it also
> display information about the equinoxe, and solstices for the year.
>
> I am using the python library Skyfield which bases all its calculations on
> the JPL ephemeris data so it is highly accurate. The challenge is that
> Skyfield uses the library sgp4 which seems to be platform dependent. If
> there is enough interest then I will see if the QGIS team would be willing
> to include them with the QGIS distribution. There is one large file that
> the user would also need to download which is the JPL ephemeris. The one I
> am using is 100 mb, but it also includes the ephemeris for all the planets
> as well with a large time span in the past and future.
>
> I am interested in how much interest there is in the QGIS community for
> these capabilities. I should have a plugin demo in several weeks for anyone
> who wants to test it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Calvin
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-- 
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Tim Sutton
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Tim is a member of the QGIS Project Steering Committee
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