3D und mehr: Zeitlich veränderliche 3D-Landschaften in Stellarium

Abstract

In recent years the open-source desktop planetarium Stellarium has been enhanced for scientific use in virtual archaeology. A dedicated plugin can be used to visualize loadable scenes of 3D reconstructions of past or present architecture in its landscape. However, while Stellarium can simulate the view of the sky and positions of celestial objects and their respective motions in sufficient accuracy for most historical applications over several millennia now, the 3D plugin until recently only could show one snapshot of a landscape. However, over centuries the orientation and tilt of Earth’s axis changes the starry sky and also the solstice points along the horizon, so that astronomical alignments which may have been useful in one epoch may not work in another. Likewise, landscapes and monuments may have changed, temples may have been rebuilt and rededicated in part to reflect such changes. Our recent developments in Stellarium now enable the simulation of phased models by configuring parts of the 3D model with material properties which can be used to hide parts of the model when they don’t fit the epoch of the currently simulated sky.