For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive simulator twentieth century, optomechanical planetarium, provided new ways for representing teaching about sky, but high construction running costs meant that they have not become common. However, in recent decades, ...

This paper presents an astronomical study of a sample ancient cairns, stelae and burials at the cairnfield Xiis (Heis) in Somaliland, historic centre long-distance trade between different cultures. The analyses reveal set significant orientations that relates to seasonal movements region’s nomads, which are believed have remained unchanged for millennia. structures, date from first third centur...

This paper proposed the algorithm of the sky color rendering based on the relationship between the height of viewpoint and the altitude of scattering point with atmospheric density after the study of atmospheric absorption and scattering and sky illumination simulation methods. It proposed the simplified algorithm of the sky perspective illumination. The geometrical model of the sky dome and ro...

We describe the software requirement and design specifications for all-sky panoramic astronomical pipelines. The described software aims to meet the specific needs of super-wide angle optics, and includes cosmic-ray hit rejection, image compression, star recognition, sky opacity analysis, transient detection and a web server allowing access to real-time and archived data. The presented software...

We present a new method to measure the episodic lifetime of quasars with current and future large-scale sky surveys. Future photometric observations of large samples of confirmed quasars can provide a direct measurement (or interesting lower limit) to the lifetime of an individual episode of quasar activity (tQ) and potentially enable the study of post-quasar host galaxies. Photometric observat...

The Aladin interactive sky atlas, developed at CDS, is a service providing simultaneous access to digitized images of the sky, astronomical catalogues, and databases. The driving motivation is to facilitate direct, visual comparison of observational data at any wavelength with images of the optical sky, and with reference catalogues. The set of available sky images consists of the STScI Digitiz...

This paper demonstrates the use of High Dynamic Range (HDR) fisheye images of the sky dome in lighting simulations. The objective is to improve the accuracy of simulations with site specific sky conditions. The luminance information stored at a pixel level in an HDR photograph is used to light the simulated environment through an Image Based Rendering (IBR) technique. The results show that imag...