How to Create a Bespoke Stellarium Landscape

[PeterC65]

I observe from home with the house behind me and open views to the south east. I've been thinking it would be useful to represent the local horizon in Stellarium, rather than guessing at what might be visible, so given the lack of clear skies recently I've spent the afternoon working out how to do this. Here is the result:

The Stellarium User Manual gives some pointers to creating a bespoke landscape and recommends using the HeyWhatsThat website to create the landscape. I started with a landscape from this website but it uses contour lines and doesn't account for buildings and trees. So I did some editing of the files to create a polygon line file that I could edit manually.

You need two files, firstly a 'landscape.ini' text based setup file which itself references a text file (I called it 'horizon.txt') containing the polygon corners. I've attached examples of both of these files (with personal data removed from the 'landscape.ini' file).

landscape - example.ini

horizon - example.txt

The Stellarium User Manual does describe the content of the 'landscape.ini' file, but not the 'horizon.txt' file. The 'horizon.txt' file is just a list of polygon corners but it has to be edited very carefully. The file lists azimuth positions in 5° steps. The x.0625 decimal places in each entry are necessary so just leave the azimuth positions as they are. The second number is the altitude of your local horizon in degrees. I haven't tried numbers below zero and zero itself needs to be 0.1 instead. These discoveries all came from quite a few hours of trial and error!

Having figured out how to edit the 'horizon.txt' file I set about measuring my local horizon. I did this by positioning the mount in it's usual spot on the patio then using the GOTO to step through azimuth in 5° steps and at each step slewing the scope in altitude until I could just see my local horizon in a wide angle scope / eyepiece combination. I made a note of the altitude at each 5° step and transferred the data to the 'horizon.txt' file.

Quite a bit of effort, but I can now clearly see where my local horizon sits in Stellarium, and on the whole it is lower in the sky that I had been thinking.

 

[happy-kat]

Something i really need to do so thanks for sharing what you did

[PeterC65]

I should probably add that I stored the two files 'landscape.ini' and 'horizon.txt' in a new folder called C:\Program Files\Stellarium\landscapes\<name of location>\. Stellarium picked up the new landscape location from here and offered it as an option when I opened the 'Sky and viewing options window' then selected the 'Lanscape' tab.