11 replies to this topic

[SimonIRE]

Hi All, 

 

I have seen others with this problem but I haven't found a solution. 

 

I am trying to add my panoramic .png photo of my horizon to Stellarium. I have both the landscape file and the .png image in a folder called "paddock". The landscape file (called "landscape") looks like this:

[landscape]
name = paddock
author = Simon
description = Simon Walsh
type = spherical
maptex = paddock.png
maptex_top = 63
maptex_bottom = -63
angle_rotatez = -50
minimal_brightness = 0.13
light_pollution = 5
atmospheric_extinction_coefficient = 0.27
atmospheric_temperature = 10

The png file is called paddock.png. 

 

When I open Stellarium I can see paddock as a landscape option but if I select it, the whole thing crashes - and closes. I have tried all manners of names for the image and .ini file but nothing works. I really like Stellarium but it not hugely helpful to me unless I can add my horizon. 

 

Any ideas?

 

Many thanks

 

Simon

[Paul Garais]

Could you upload your unaltered files (zip the landscape folder)? Maybe you have some exotic charset in use? Or the PNG file has issues. Not joking: I saw people that sent me JPG-files. After I asked for PNG, they just changed the file extension from JPG to PNG and did sent me the same file again. I do not assume you did the same, but maybe used some unusual options while saving the PNG file?

Beside that: Your pasted file content does not show any line breaks (at least in Tapatalk). And it has no closing tag (need to check, if it needs any).


—Paul

[LarsMalmgren]

The image resolution needs to be a power of 1024, but max is 4096 pixels wide and 2048 height IIRC.

 

So try to scale your image.

If it does not have a 2048 pixel height after scaling then you need to add to the image.

Now wether that should be at the bottom or top or little of both is a quetion of where your horizont is in the image.

Then horizont must be in the middle of the height of the image.

 

I have a lot of buildings etc so i didn't have a clear horizont.

I solved that by having the camera on a tripod that was precisely leveled and i carefully leveled the camera also.

This way the center of the image is also the horizont (not taking the earth curvature into account though).

 

Does this make sence to you?

[SimonIRE]

Could you upload your unaltered files (zip the landscape folder)? Maybe you have some exotic charset in use? Or the PNG file has issues. Not joking: I saw people that sent me JPG-files. After I asked for PNG, they just changed the file extension from JPG to PNG and did sent me the same file again. I do not assume you did the same, but maybe used some unusual options while saving the PNG file?

Beside that: Your pasted file content does not show any line breaks (at least in Tapatalk). And it has no closing tag (need to check, if it needs any).


—Paul

 

Hi Paul,

 

Many thanks for this. Have a look at the attached file. The image was created in Photoshop and if I am honest, the untouched version was 1.5MB. I had to compress this image to send it in this attachment. I am not sure if this alters the image parameters in a way that impacts its use in Stellarium. Let me know and thanks!

 

Simon

Attached Files

•  paddock (2).zip   466.49KB   35 downloads

[Paul Garais]

Hi Paul,

 

Many thanks for this. Have a look at the attached file. The image was created in Photoshop and if I am honest, the untouched version was 1.5MB. I had to compress this image to send it in this attachment. I am not sure if this alters the image parameters in a way that impacts its use in Stellarium. Let me know and thanks!

 

Simon

Hi Simon,

 

changing the file (compressing is a big cahnge for images) is altering what your computer and using and what I am getting to use here. So be aware that not all of the following points may be true for your case but only for the contents of your ZIP file (things like file name):

 

• The file is named "paddock.png.png" which is not the same as "paddock.png" (which is given in the landscape.ini). The ini-File looks fine to me. Only difference to my own files is, that I also have a "[location]-tag" in it, which is optional.
• Your landscape does not cause a crash on my system with Stellarium 0.19.0 on Windows 10, but likely will on a lot of other systems. The reason for this is, I tested it on my stationary machine, which is a powerful toy for gaming but also video encoding and 3D rendering (and obviously stacking astrophotos ^^), which has a 980ti, 6-core i7 and 64 GB RAM. I am sure it will crash on my astro notebook, which does not have a dedicated 3D graphics card. Lars already stated the problem in his post that your PNG suffers from: It does not have the right dimensions. Your file is 4096 x 685. That is not working, because both dimensions need to be powers of 2. You can find the relevant information in this website: https://stellarium.org/landscapes.html . It says:
  
  

   

  IMPORTANT: Make sure all textures have dimensions which are integer powers of 2, i.e. 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, ... e.g. 4096 by 1024, 2048 by 2048 and so on.

  This is a limitation of OpenGL. Some video hardware will work OK with images with different image dimensions, but many will not display properly, suffer vastly reduced frame rates, and even crash the computer.

  I use 2048 x 1024 for my landscape files and it works fine.

• The next problem with your PNG is, that is only is a narrow strip of the landscape, but you need more. Image this: The image height is everything from the point, where your feet are standing to zenith. This is, why your image needs to have the horizon right in the middle. From the horizon to zenith, it needs to have 90 degrees. So have to correct for this. Just to give you an example, I send you a screenshot of what your landscape looks in Stellarium and what my landscapes looks in Stellarium. You will also find my PNG landscape image as reduced JPG for clarity in the attached images.

Hope this makes the problems clear and you can now solve them!

 

Your landscape (would love to have that southern views ^^:

 

My landscape:

 

My source file:

 

 

– Paul

[SimonIRE]

Hi Simon,

changing the file (compressing is a big cahnge for images) is altering what your computer and using and what I am getting to use here. So be aware that not all of the following points may be true for your case but only for the contents of your ZIP file (things like file name):

• The file is named "paddock.png.png" which is not the same as "paddock.png" (which is given in the landscape.ini). The ini-File looks fine to me. Only difference to my own files is, that I also have a "[location]-tag" in it, which is optional.
• Your landscape does not cause a crash on my system with Stellarium 0.19.0 on Windows 10, but likely will on a lot of other systems. The reason for this is, I tested it on my stationary machine, which is a powerful toy for gaming but also video encoding and 3D rendering (and obviously stacking astrophotos ^^), which has a 980ti, 6-core i7 and 64 GB RAM. I am sure it will crash on my astro notebook, which does not have a dedicated 3D graphics card. Lars already stated the problem in his post that your PNG suffers from: It does not have the right dimensions. Your file is 4096 x 685. That is not working, because both dimensions need to be powers of 2. You can find the relevant information in this website: https://stellarium.org/landscapes.html . It says:
  
  
  I use 2048 x 1024 for my landscape files and it works fine.
• The next problem with your PNG is, that is only is a narrow strip of the landscape, but you need more. Image this: The image height is everything from the point, where your feet are standing to zenith. This is, why your image needs to have the horizon right in the middle. From the horizon to zenith, it needs to have 90 degrees. So have to correct for this. Just to give you an example, I send you a screenshot of what your landscape looks in Stellarium and what my landscapes looks in Stellarium. You will also find my PNG landscape image as reduced JPG for clarity in the attached images.

Hope this makes the problems clear and you can now solve them!

Your landscape (would love to have that southern views ^^:
landscape-paddock.jpg

My landscape:
landscape-garten.jpg

My source file:
landscape-garten-reduced.jpg


– Paul

This is brilliant; I will do this

BTW - I built my PC with 4 Titan GPUs, has a 256 GB split RAM and is also used for deep learning research; I suspect I have the power.....

Edited by SimonIRE, 08 June 2020 - 11:44 AM.

[Paul Garais]

This is brilliant; I will do this

BTW - I built my PC with 4 Titan GPUs, has a 256 GB split RAM and is also used for deep learning research; I suspect I have the power.....

Okay ^^. That system definitly should not have to suffer by any OpenGL limits

[Alexander Wolf]

• The file is named "paddock.png.png" which is not the same as "paddock.png" (which is given in the landscape.ini). The ini-File looks fine to me. Only difference to my own files is, that I also have a "[location]-tag" in it, which is optional.

Thanks for checking, Paul! Obviously we should add more checks for textures of landscapes to avoid crashes. Maybe with adding warning dialogs in GUI.

[gzotti]

Sorry, but the only problem is a file named paddock.png.png when it should be named paddock.png. I call this "personal responsibility". Read the Stellarium User Guide, section 5.1.1, about enabling display of known file endings FN2:.

 

This is a very confusing default setting and in fact a security risk: Consider you receive an email
with some file funny.png.exe attached. Your explorer displays this as funny.png. You double-click it,
expecting to open some image browser with a funny image. However, you start some unknown program
instead, and running this .exe executable program may turn out to be anything but funny!

 

 

 

It may be possible to handle "file not found" more gracefully though.

 

The notes about non-power-of-two textures predate OpenGL 2.0, but its support should now be mandatory on all systems running Qt5 (Stellarium 0.13 and later). Adhering to the 2^n recommendation does not hurt, though, and preserves compatibility with WinXP Atom netbooks with Stellarium 0.12 or whatever legacy systems are still floating around.

[SimonIRE]

Sorry, but the only problem is a file named paddock.png.png when it should be named paddock.png. I call this "personal responsibility". Read the Stellarium User Guide, section 5.1.1, about enabling display of known file endings FN2:.
.

Hmmm. You can call it whatever you like. This wasn’t the issue; I added that extension before I zipped the file. The issue was the image dimension and actual configuration.

[SimonIRE]

Hi Simon,

 

changing the file (compressing is a big cahnge for images) is altering what your computer and using and what I am getting to use here. So be aware that not all of the following points may be true for your case but only for the contents of your ZIP file (things like file name):

 

• The file is named "paddock.png.png" which is not the same as "paddock.png" (which is given in the landscape.ini). The ini-File looks fine to me. Only difference to my own files is, that I also have a "[location]-tag" in it, which is optional.
• Your landscape does not cause a crash on my system with Stellarium 0.19.0 on Windows 10, but likely will on a lot of other systems. The reason for this is, I tested it on my stationary machine, which is a powerful toy for gaming but also video encoding and 3D rendering (and obviously stacking astrophotos ^^), which has a 980ti, 6-core i7 and 64 GB RAM. I am sure it will crash on my astro notebook, which does not have a dedicated 3D graphics card. Lars already stated the problem in his post that your PNG suffers from: It does not have the right dimensions. Your file is 4096 x 685. That is not working, because both dimensions need to be powers of 2. You can find the relevant information in this website: https://stellarium.org/landscapes.html . It says:
  
  

  I use 2048 x 1024 for my landscape files and it works fine.

• The next problem with your PNG is, that is only is a narrow strip of the landscape, but you need more. Image this: The image height is everything from the point, where your feet are standing to zenith. This is, why your image needs to have the horizon right in the middle. From the horizon to zenith, it needs to have 90 degrees. So have to correct for this. Just to give you an example, I send you a screenshot of what your landscape looks in Stellarium and what my landscapes looks in Stellarium. You will also find my PNG landscape image as reduced JPG for clarity in the attached images.

Hope this makes the problems clear and you can now solve them!

 

Your landscape (would love to have that southern views ^^:

landscape-paddock.jpg

 

My landscape:

landscape-garten.jpg

 

My source file:

landscape-garten-reduced.jpg

 

 

– Paul

 

Hi Paul,

 

This works perfectly - many thanks. 

 

Interestingly, in order to get an image with the resolution I wanted, I ended up with a large file (very large - 20 MB). Despite this, the application works flawlessly (presumably because of the machine I have it running on). 

 

Thanks again - very happy to be able to use Stellarium now to plan my viewing. 

 

Simon

[Paul Garais]

Thanks again - very happy to be able to use Stellarium now to plan my viewing.

It is! I have that big cherry tree in my backyard and the roof of the neighbor in southern direction is high (M42 just barely rises above it in Winter). With your own backyard in Stellarium you can be sure your imaging session works throughout the night and you can plan in daylight.

I wouldn't want to miss it anymore