10110111 / CalcMySky

Simulator of light scattering by planetary atmospheres
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Astronomical use #20

Open ajeb78 opened 2 months ago

ajeb78 commented 2 months ago

The lowest possible light pollution luminance it seems possible to set using the showmysky GUI is 0.01cd/m^2. For simulating dark sky zones it would be nice to be able to set at least an order of magnitude lower: the LP luminance in Bortle 4 zones is around 0.0025 cd/m^2 and in Bortle 1 it may be as low as 0.0014 cd/m^2.

(Yes perhaps it's weird trying to simulate such dark skies but I'm interested in the sky background spectrum I should expect in the absence of any light from astronomical sources.)

It's already a very cool sky model, but would it be possible to add a simulation of zodiacal light and skyglow?

10110111 commented 2 months ago

Given that there's no support for airglow, I don't think you can rely on accuracy of the night time brightness of this model in such dark conditions. What currently is modeled is just the scattered light from the Sun and from the uniformly glowing ground (which itself is actually a crude approximation to finite-sized cities' light pollution, overestimating the brightness near the horizon).

You can edit the sources to extend the limitations of the GUI controls, but again, this may give you useless results, particularly for Bortle classes 1 and 2.

Airglow support is planned but I don't have any ETA. Zodiacal light is out of scope of this model, which is only concerned with the atmosphere of the planet, rather than the dust scattered over the Solar system.