lugduna-gaiasky's Introduction

lugduna-gaiasky

Visualize the orbit of the asteroid 1133 Lugduna with GaiaSky. This video was made in connection with the Leiden European City of Science 2022 events.

Many thanks to Toni Sagristà Sellés for helping me figure out how to create this GaiaSky animation.

How to reproduce the video

GaiaSky setup

Install GaiaSky
Run GaiaSky first to configure it properly for reproducing the video:
- Make sure that the Hipparcos data set is installed (in addition to the base data set
- Run GaiaSky and change the GUI Graphics settings to windowed mode with a size of 1280x720 pixels
Exit GaiaSky

GaiaSky config files

To use PNG output frames edit ~/.xdg/gaiasky/config.yaml and change the "JPG" occurences to "PNG"
- This step is only needed after the first time running GaiaSky
Copy the file orbit-lugduna.json from the gsfiles folder to ~/.local/share/gaiasky/data/default-data/
Copy the file dataset.json from the gsfiles folder to ~/.local/share/gaiasky/data/default-data/, replacing the existing dataset.json
Edit ~/gaiasky/conf/config.yaml and change "pointCloud: POINTS" to "pointCloud: TRIANGLES" (assuming your hardware can handle this).

Create the video

Start GaiaSky and while GaiaSky is running execute the following instruction from the command line:

python lugduna.py -s

Generate the video by running (can be done without GaiaSky running):

./makevideo.sh [-e] [-n]

The output videos can be found in the video folder.

If you modify anything you can see what the animation sequence looks like by running python lugduna.py without the -s switch. This will be faster (no frames are stored from GaiaSky) but the explanations and Lugduna and date labels will be missing (these are added with the makevideo.sh script).