Starplot - New! Custom data catalogs...
Starplot v0.18 🎉
A new version, v0.18, of Starplot is now available on PyPI and includes:
📓 Custom Data Catalogs
You can now create your own catalogs of stars, DSOs, and constellations. There's also built-in support for HEALPix indexing and Hive partitioning which can significantly improve the querying performance on very large catalogs (1M+ objects).
Related to this change is another BIG change: Starplot no longer includes catalogs for stars/DSOs/constellations as part of its Python package. This decision was made because our package size was getting pretty big, and PyPI has a size limit for projects (for good reason) and we are almost at half the limit.
However, as part of the new catalog framework, catalogs can have URLs and if the catalog doesn't exist at the data path then Starplot will download it from that URL.
And although the previous star/DSO/constellation catalogs are no longer included in the Python package itself, they are still used as defaults for everything and will be downloaded from their respective GitHub release pages the first time you use them.
↗️ Arrow Function
Adds a function to all plot types for drawing an arrow from one point to another OR just to a target. These can be useful for creating star-hopping maps.
🔭 Increases Max FOV on Optic Plots
The maximum is now 20 degrees. For larger fields of view, you should use the optic_fov function on map/horizon plots.
🌐 Translation for Persian/Farsi
Thanks to @rafi-ghanbari 👏
✨ Showcase
Plotted above is M13, The Great Hercules Globular Cluster, using star data from Gaia DR3. The Gaia catalog builder is still a work in progress, so it's not "officially" supported yet, but you can help test it out and report any errors you find. See more details here.
🚀 Coming Soon
In the next minor version of Starplot (v0.19):
- Label collision handling improvements
🙋 Help Wanted
Want to help make Starplot better? Here are a few things we need help with right now:
- Check for errors on the Gaia DR3 catalog builder
- Adding more language translations - details here
- Creating more catalog builders
Read more about contributing here ↗️
💙 Show your support for Starplot
- All Sky Map - made with Starplot!
- Starplot stickers
Happy Starplotting!
Steve Berardi