Category: demo

JunoCam Citizen Science

My first attempt at Citizen Science on display in the dome!

A few weeks ago, I watched this video, produced by the Griffith Observatory a year ago:

As in the demonstration video I watched, I used Gimp. Of course I could have used Krita, but Gimp is my go-to since I’m so familiar with it.

First I downloaded set of images from 2021-07-21 Perijove 35:

https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?id=11074

I opened the three color PNGs as layers and colorized them accordingly.

Then I played around with the individual layers’ brightness and contrast settings, then combined using Screen as the blend mode.

After I got the colors close to how I liked them, I used the G’Mic Tone Sharpening to bring out the detail.  (https://gmic.eu/index.html)

Before tone sharpening
After tone sharpening

I spent very little time on it, about 25 minutes total. I’m pleased with it and look forward to showing others how to make their own.

Fun with Blender and Mars

Had a bit of fun making videos to celebrate in the weeks leading up to the Mars Perseverance landing. This one was one of my favorites.

Links from the video:

Blender http://www.blender.org​

Blender HiRISE DTM Importer http://github.com/phaseIV/Blender-Hir…​

HiRISE DTM Quickstart http://www.uahirise.org/dtm/howto.php​

Terrain model data http://www.uahirise.org/dtm/dtm.php?I…​

Mars Perseverance Mission http://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Stellarium remote fun

I LOVE open source software! 

Stellarium sky

Stellarium is one of the top open source software packages for desktop sky viewing. Since I won’t be presenting shows in a physical planetarium any time soon, I figured I should work out how to present better online.

Stellarium has a remote web interface plugin that is pretty easy to set up.  So I’m using my giant monitor for presentation and my little monitor for controls and for programming.

I’m clumsy with the on-screen menus, so having them on a separate monitor is great! Some actions take a while to set up, so I tried a little scripting to automate some stuff.
And then I decided that rather than hunting through pull-down menus for my little scripts I should make some buttons for scripts and actions.
So I started modifying the html. 
And relied on the kindness of a stranger’s blog post to expose the functionality.
Thankfully I found an Atom package to make that json readable.
I don’t often spend enough time in any given language to get good at it. But in this effort, I’m digging into Stellarium scripting/javascript, html, and to find the right language for scripting actions I found myself searching the source code for the project itself.

Fractal Flames a happy mistake

I used a flame that I generated in Gimp, then converted it to the XML format using flam3-convert, then used defaults with flam3-generate and rendered with flam3-render.
I’m working on a workflow to generate some for dome use, but not random defaults.
Oh yes, I didn’t apply any processing, just strung the frames together. 

Fulldome Blender 2.8 Workshop GLPA 2019

The 2019 annual meeting of the Great Lakes Planetarium Association was held last week, hosted by the Ritter Planetarium of The University of Toledo.

It was special for me because my planetarium career started at Ritter Planetarium in February 1992. Honestly I had planned to stop conducting workshops for a few years so that I could concentrate on my GLPA executive community duties. But Alex Mak asked so of course I said yes.

The result is a very revised version *NEW!* for Blender 2.8:

https://github.com/waystar/2019-Blender-Workshop-Materials

  • Setting up render engine, camera and outputs for fulldome masters.
  • Setting up layers to separate objects for compositing to get glows or denoising only on some objects.
  • Compositing node setups examples.
  • Basics of materials, with shader node tree examples for incorporating alpha channels and animating fades between textures.
  • World environment settings and node trees for animation.
  • Examples of animating various objects and effects achieved through animating modifiers.

https://github.com/waystar/2019-Blender-Workshop-Materials

Click the “Clone or download” button to download the whole thing in a zip file.

Drop me a line if you find mistakes or OS-related differences. (I test on Linux and Windows.) Also, let me know if you find any of it particularly useful and I would LOVE to see what you make.

And of course, if you are having trouble with something in particular that you are trying to do, let me know. If I can’t help get it to work, I might be able to suggest alternate approaches to get the same effect.

Using GIMP to slice images

A very cool effect in our digital planetarium is to take slices of an image and use them to seemingly build or break apart the image.

In our Digistar system, I create an empty object to be the parent of all of the needed image planes and position the image planes accordingly.

By keeping the image slices organized in folders, the separate image planes can be assigned slidesets to advance or reverse through a set of images.

To make the image slices, I use GIMP.

 

There are lots of ways to place guides for cutting. I’m accustomed to a script that lets me put the guide positions in by percentage. I don’t speak German, but the script maker does. 

I check the boxes to indicate that I’m setting the guides by percentage, then I enter percentages and select horizontal or vertical.

My guides are in place.

Select Filters > Web > Slice

Because the slice tool is meant for web work, an html file is created. I just delete that later.

And then I have a folder full of sliced image pieces!

Blender workshop at the 2017 Pleiades Conference

This was another great memory.

I had lots of wonderful help running the workshop, and I was very proud of the result. The materials include several examples of methods for creating fulldome content with Blender 2.79.


The materials are currently on my GitHub account – click “Clone or Download” to download the whole thing as a zip file.

2017 Blender Workshop Materials

I hope to remake the materials with Blender 2.80. Mostly the same, but the interface and shortcuts have changed. The new features are still evolving and could merit a new chapter.

I’m keeping the Blender 2.79 materials around, though. Folks with older computers might not be able to run Blender 2.80.