Backyard Garden

Tutorial: Your Custom Backyard in Stellarium



Hey folks,
in this video we want to replace the native landscapes within Stellarium with your very own and personal backyard.
This helps enormously with imaging session planing: When does a Galaxy vanish behind a tree or a building next to your garden? When does the planets appear in the gap between the garage and your neighbors house?

And it’s as easy as it gets: One image with your Smartphone, one textfile with copied text and that’s that!

Come and join me on my journey to the night sky here on catchingphotons!
-Chris

Stellarium: https://stellarium.org/en/
paint.net: https://www.getpaint.net/download.html

Text of the landscape.ini [empty parts are otpional]

[landscape]
name = Hometown
author =Chris on YouTube
description = my backyard in midd Germany
type = spherical
maptex = chrisbackyard.png
angle_rotatez = +5
[location]
name = Hometown
planet = Earth
country = Germany
lattitude =
longitude =
alititude =

25 Comments

  1. great Video Chris. I could Do this, However there Are lots Of Obstruction in my Place, Basically I Do all my Astro from Balcony, lol 😅

  2. We haven't seen you in a long time. Thanks for the tutorial! I downloaded it for, later when I do an observatory above my studio on the roof and connect the goto via Wi-Fi to the computer and the Stelarium. This was a good lesson, you helped me. Have a nice day~

  3. Nice to see this documented on youtube!
    Been doing that with every personal astro location for years 😉
    BTW – you can add an alter the folders in /path/stellarium/landscapes/… directly – no need to zip up every time you edit.
    Also if your computer is hefty enough, try adding 4096×2048 panos – works for me and just looks so much nicer 😉

  4. I've always wanted to have this custom background! Thanks so much, Chris.

  5. Great video! Just a quick one: For those who have the newest Photoshop CC to edit with… Getting rid of a sky, filling in areas and resizing is amazingly so Simple now! Photoshop CC has taken ALL the hard work out of deleting a sky! For those that don't have Photoshop CC your method is really good. 👍Thanks!

  6. Cool Video Chris! Customizing Stellarium with your home Landscape looks very good, and can be useful in many situations

  7. My backyard looks like if you stand on top of the everest with a 360 camera and everything is soo close haha

  8. My iPhone 13 pro can’t do full 360° panoramas. I’ll have to stitch together 2 panoramas or find an app that can do a 360° panorama

  9. Excellent tutorial. However, it took me about 4 hours to figure out what I was doing wrong when trying to upload it to Stellarium, but I finally got it figured out. Thanks so much.

  10. Hi Chris, Thank you very much for this video. I already did it following exactly every recommendation and my backyard looks amazing. Please could you explain how you created this video? I will want to create some personal videos like this one to explain my children and some friend's children using stellarium as background. Beforehand thank you.

  11. hello, is this Stellarium live feed? how do I update livefeed? for today 2/21/2022 I heard venus jupitor and moon be a line so I am watching in live. but I think this is a recorded.

  12. I've seen two other channels show how to do this, but they nveer elabourated on 'zeroing' your location. Nice video

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