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[Feature Request] Dynamic Magnitude Limit for Solar System’s Bodies

Morris

May 26, 2020 21:10

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I’m writing here to know if it is possible to add the feature of automatically adjusting the magnitude limit of *solar system’s bodies* as the user zooms in and out. If it already exists, sorry for my message (I'm a SkySafari Pro user) :-)

The best would be:

(1) having solar system’s bodies displayed as the stars, i.e., not with a fixed magnitude aspect (when zoom out the map becomes very confusing with too much asteroids displayed as mag 1 stars), and

(2) providing the user the possibility to choose how much deeper go with respect to the displayed stars: e.g., +3 “delta magnitude deeper” means in a field where mag 9 stars are displayed, see up to 12 mag solar system bodies. But when zoom out and only mag 6 stars are visible, see up to 9 mag solar system bodies and so on.

This would be very useful, since when looking at large portion of the sky, having, for instance, all the 13th mag asteroids is very confusing. But when looking at a narrow field with a big telescope, see also the low mag bodies can be very useful (clearly, without having to go in the menu each time and change the thresholds as I have to do now)

Moreover, for instance, when I look planets I would like to see low mag moons (e.g., of Neptune or Uranus), but if I zoom out I don’t want to see hundreds of 14+ mag asteroids. :-)

IMHO, such a dynamic adjusting magnitude limit for solar system’s bodies would be a really useful feature.

Thank you so much for your attention.

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1 comment

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  Mike August 05, 2021 01:09

  Hello.  I was about to ask about this as a separate post, but then found this was already here, so I'll add my vote and reasoning to the thread.  For reference, I'm using SkySafari Pro 6 on Android.

  Personally I think it'd be very useful if the solar system magnitude limit behaved in a similar way to the magnitude limit for stars.  If it were simpler to implement then I'd consider simply applying the limit for stars to also apply for asteroids (they're all point sources in the sky for the most part), and perhaps apply the limit for DSOs to comets, but I'm unsure how others might feel about this.

  I like doing star hopping to find asteroids and so tend to prefer leaving asteroids switched on, and labels switched on so it's easy to identify which point on the map is an asteroid I'm searching for.

  A complication I've had with this approach in Sky Safari is that if I just have it display all asteroids, the sky map view becomes impractically crowded with extremely faint asteroids and their labels, especially when zoomed out. I can set a solar system magnitude limit, but if I do so it often means that when I zoom in for hopping to a specific asteroid, it's no longer shown on the map.

  For me It'd be really helpful if the magnitude limit behaved in a similar way to the limit for stars, where fainter-than-limit objects are still displayed, according to some kind of algorithm, while zooming in.