Astrocraft: Realistic Night Skies

A lot of code has been rewritten in this update, and this beta version may still be buggy.

Comets

Small icy bodies with highly eccentric orbits. As comets approach the sun, they brighten rapidly and tails start to form. Some comets even exceed Venus in brightness.

Spyglass Zoom

You can now zoom in further, by scrolling with the mouse wheel. This causes issues when Spyglass Improvements is installed, you can disable Astrocraft's zoom in the config.

Star Rendering Rewrite

Star Rendering is now 20x faster, and you can set the Magnitude Limit config option up to magnitude 11 (previously 6).

Planet Configuration

Semi-Major-Axis and Eccentricity options in the planets' orbit config, have been replaced with Perihelion and Aphelion Radii, which should be more intuitive. If you have the semi-major-axis and eccentricity of an orbit, you can convert using the following:

• q = a * (1 - e)
• Q = a * (1 + e)

Also highly eccentric or inclined orbits are no longer broken.

The Absolute Magnitude option is now Diameter. Magnitude is calculate from the configured Diameter and Color (albedo).

Custom Star Configuration

Custom stars can now be binary systems with exoplanets. Which you can "observe" from, using the Observing Location option. You can also set a star's color to a temperature (K) or spectral class.

Live Mode

Live Mode uses real-life time and planetary positions, though it may not be accurate for things like eclipses. Timezones / Globe Mode is now working again.

Sun and Moon Compatibility

The sun and moon is rendered using vanilla textures, which means many resource packs and mods changing those textures now work again. This includes: Cubic Sun & Moon, and Enchanced Celestials.