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I am wanting to capture video of Stellarium (I can already do this with CamStodio) and somehow convert this into a video usable for the YouTube 360 (or VR!) capability.

Even if it can be converted into 180 and I need to add an image of the ground or spaceship to fill the rest of the image, that would still be super helpful!

I have found this, which gives a good overview of the maths of converting various projections (I haven't gone through it in detail yet), but I was wondering if someone has already written something to do this, before I go and write my own code for it?

I already use Davinci Resolve for my video editing, and I'm on a Windows 10 Pro (with access to various Linux machines).

Cheers!

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  • $\begingroup$ There is a stellarium360 program dedicated to projections in planetariums. lss-planetariums.info/… $\endgroup$ – usernumber Mar 16 '20 at 13:59
  • $\begingroup$ My answer to astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/20018/… may be nominally helpful, but I think the link above (which redirects to another site) is probably more useful $\endgroup$ – user21 Mar 16 '20 at 14:03
  • $\begingroup$ thank you so much, both of you! $\endgroup$ – user1153070 Mar 19 '20 at 9:23
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360° panoramic media conventionally use equirectangular projection and a 2:1 aspect ratio. I made a still panorama this way:

  • Configuration > Tools > Screenshots: Custom size 2048 x 1024

  • View > Sky > Projection: Cylinder (i.e. equirectangular)

  • View > Sky > Stars: Relative scale 0.70 (limits brightest stars to a reasonable size)

  • FOV 180° (Ctrl+Alt+1)

  • Other view options as desired (e.g. turn off ground, atmosphere, labels)

Then I saved a screenshot (Ctrl+S) and injected the appropriate metadata. The result is viewable as a 360° panorama.

Constellations near the center of view look OK in any view direction, but stars near the zenith look rather dim and rice-shaped. I guess this could be remedied by something like the "Spheric mirror distortion" option (Configuration > Tools > Planetarium options) but within the "Cylinder" projection. I don't know of a Stellarium plugin which does this yet.

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Using the method suggested by Mike G I have got the basics for converting Stellarium video into 360 video that can be uploaded to YouTube.

After doing as suggested by Mike G, I use CamStudio to record Stellarium, LVC Media Player to convert from API to MP4 (for some reason the mp4 option in CamStudio doesn't work properly for me), then Spatial Media Metadata Injector to turn it into a format that YouTube will recognise as 360, then I upload it to YouTube as per normal!

You can see a basic working video here https://youtu.be/9A1pZCJLuK4

There are still things to change to get a well stitched image with a good resolution, but the basic functionality works.

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  • $\begingroup$ Cool! Thanks for sharing your result. $\endgroup$ – Mike G Mar 23 '20 at 13:16

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