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Stars (Virtual Night Sky)
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Email
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| Submitted on: |
12/23/2006 5:39:13 AM |
| By: |
Jeremiah Hughes
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| Level: |
Advanced |
| User Rating: |
By 26 Users |
| Compatibility: |
VB 6.0 |
| Views: |
20127 |
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(About the author) |
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Enter your longitude and latitude and the program will display the positions of all the stars in the sky as viewed from your location. Place the cursor over a star to get more information. Click on the picture window and press the right and left arrow keys to move one degree in that direction. Hold Shift to move five degrees and Ctrl to move a quarter degree.
Obviously, there's a lot more that could be added to this program (saving your location, for example) but it works as is and I've gotten a little tired of messing with it. :) Feel free to make additions to it. Also, comments and votes are welcome. Thanks!
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Other 13 submission(s) by this author
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Other User Comments
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 12/14/2006 9:16:09 AM: TerriTop
Jeremiah, this is too cool! I love the fact that one can mouse over the, location and get the star and related data. How about the ability to load or save locations. Perhaps a Lon/Lat lookup method based on major cities...5 Stars for the nice submission!! Cheers TerriTop
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12/14/2006 10:45:33 AM: Aaron Schulz
This is absolutely supurb! I'm amazed you could fit all that functionality into such a small piece of code.
One of the best contributions I have seen.
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12/14/2006 11:18:59 AM: Paul Bahlawan
That is really quite impressive! Too bad about all the weirdly named and shortened star names. Also too bad you are not working on it any more because there are sooo many features just begging to be added!
um,I noticed when comparing to Starry Night you seem to be almost 2 hours ahead (or maybe it's something else) that is altering the view a bit.
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12/14/2006 11:32:15 AM: Jeremiah Hughes
Thanks for the nice comments. Yeah, I also noticed some of the star names were pretty weird but, unfortunately, that was the only database of stars I could find on the Internet. I'm not sure why it's two hours ahead for you. Did you adjust the time zone in addition to the latitude and longitude?
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12/15/2006 6:46:16 AM: Ron D.
German users have to replace the Slash in Private Sub RightNow()with a ".". Otherwise they will get an error.
Great tool !
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12/15/2006 7:00:42 AM: ben
Great. 5 stars from me!
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12/15/2006 1:42:20 PM: William J Matthews
The values that you have (see below), because of your date format, should read
A = InStr(1, Temp, "/")
B = InStr(A + 1, Temp, "/")
Change the "/" to read "-". This will make it the same with your date format.
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12/15/2006 1:59:24 PM: Jeremiah Hughes
I didn't realize that the date function returned different delimiters for people in different regions. I bet the order of the month, day and year varies from the standard American "MMDDYYYY" too, doesn't it? Does anyone know of an easy fix for this? Is there a way to access the current day, month and year in VB separately?
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12/15/2006 2:00:29 PM: Gregor53
Great job! ***** from me! What about adding constellation names to this, too?
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12/15/2006 2:28:27 PM: Richard Mewett
Great work! Very original submission, take my *****. FYI the GetUserLocaleInfo() API can be used to determine the date seperator character used. VB also has Year(), Month() & Day() functions for extracting data from a date.
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12/15/2006 2:33:09 PM: Jeremiah Hughes
Thanks, Richard. I've replaced all that InStr stuff with this:
Text4(0).Text = Month(Date)
Text4(1).Text = Day(Date)
Text4(2).Text = Year(Date)
Much simpler! :) That should solve all the regional date problems.
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12/15/2006 6:49:41 PM: AhmedQatar
5 stars for this !!!
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12/16/2006 12:50:19 AM: Bill K of Boston
well done
5 *
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12/16/2006 3:24:44 AM: Steve Abbott
As this is proving so popular, if you want a new adventure then you need to add the planets and the moon. For this you need the ephemerides over some reasonable timespan. The freeware way of doing this (as you are already publishing your code) is via
http://www.astro.com/swisseph/
You can get a .dll from them and a simple .bas module which then gives you the data to do the calculation in the same way (I think!) as you do the sun.
I've programmed this stuff once for a different reason and it's quite easy and most educational. The reason I said "over some reasonable timespan" is that if you want to know planet positions for +/- 3000 years then you need a multi-MB set of ephemerides that you can also download from the same site. But for a simple program with good enough data for a few years the default settings are fine.
If you want to tackle this, drop me an email and I can help.
Steve
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12/16/2006 12:36:54 PM: Matt DeKok
breathtaking. EXCELLENT WORK!!!!
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12/17/2006 2:09:00 AM: Paul Turcksin
This application seems to be made for PC's having a particular date/time format configured. I got stuck in the RigthNow sub. Instead of extracting date/time vaues from a string, you could use the Day, Month, Year, ... functions provided in VB to make this application independent from specific PC setups.
Text4(0).Text = Month(Date)
Text4(1).Text = Day(Date)
Text4(2).Text = Year(Date)
Text3(0).Text = Hour(Now)
Text3(1).Text = Minute(Now)
Text3(2).Text = Second(Now)
Be also aware that only a small part of the world uses the AM/PM time notation.
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12/17/2006 8:02:36 AM: Steve Abbott
I've now got a version working that shows all the planets. Drop me an email and I'll send this version to you. Because like so much of the world I use the 24hr clock I had to get rid of all your am/pm code as it confused things greatly - but as long as you don't mix my version with yours you should be able to sort things out. The positions of the planets (including Sun and Moon) look reasonable compared to "real" software but I've not checked them carefully. "My" position of the Sun differs slightly from yours, which may well be some sort of subtle error between us.
Steve
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12/17/2006 1:35:02 PM: Thomas Swift
A good place to start and expand would be to use the yahoo geocode lookup, just type the zipcode in. I may add it myself.LOL
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12/17/2006 1:53:07 PM: Thomas Swift
Gilbert Az, Hello neighbor ! Apache Junction here ! Nice piece of code ! 5 Globes from me. I still say the geocode lookup would definitely be an added plus. It would give it that extra touch of accuracy. For example: http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=66949&lngWId=1
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12/18/2006 12:32:28 PM: Steve Abbott
My final mods have a Sunrise/Sunset detector making the sky blue during the day then fade to black as the sun sets and fades into twilight. The sunset is NOT (as I'd first thought) the time the program calculates that the sun goes beneath the horizon but the time the top of the sun disappears from view which includes refraction by the atmosphere and the size of the sun's disc. It's all good learning material.
Steve
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12/22/2006 2:02:24 PM: Jeremiah Hughes
I've added a 24 hour mode for those of you who don't use the "AM/PM" time format. Hopefully it all works but I didn't test the mod throroughly so if there are any bugs please let me know.
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12/24/2006 12:55:04 AM: Brian Ail
hmm why are my stars arranged in a line, which they arent on your screenshot?
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12/24/2006 1:39:46 PM: Jeremiah Hughes
Your stars are arranged in a line? I have no idea. :-/ Sorry
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12/25/2006 12:57:58 PM: Bugzy
Nice project Jeremiah, very original. Five *'s.
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12/25/2006 8:21:48 PM: David M Rice
This is very fine. Thank you. I used it to search the entire night sky but I still didn't find Santa Claus, however.
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12/25/2006 8:25:53 PM: David M Rice
Post Script. One can use a GPS and / or the "NMEA Sage Talker" control to provide latitude and longitude as well as time and direction, all updated automatically. Maybe I'll do that, and also use Swiss Ephemeris for planets, Sol, and Luna....
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12/29/2006 12:02:27 AM: David M Rice
Is LST correct in this program? It seems to be off, as far as I can tell. I followed the routines given at http://www.tnni.net/~dustymars/Mephemeris.htm and the values do not match this otherwise fun 'stars' program.
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12/31/2006 3:51:54 PM: Victor B
5 Stars for Stars ! I have been looking for something like this !
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5/29/2008 11:06:33 AM: Thomas Swift
I notice you still have to input your longitude and latitude. You might want to check out GeoZip2: http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/default.asp?lngCId=70588&lngWId=1
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4/11/2009 8:46:20 AM: Keith Stanier
I don't know why you need a large StarData.txt files for the data. When I run it it takes 3 or 4 minutes to show anything because its reading the data from the file. Surely this data could be added internally which will speed the startup process. When you close the app it crashes VB you have nothing in the Form_Unload. When it eventually does run it works quite well.
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