Implemented:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40834
http://wiki.maemo.org/Orrery

brainstorm: http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...low_your_star/

Idea:
I am looking for a program|widget|theme-background to follow the current nights sky relative to my location with a helping hand to figure out which constellation I am able to see atm.

Solution #1: Ciclope Astro
a program|widget based on the toolset of "Ciclope Astro - Web-based Planetarium" (GPL)
The current implementation uses Java to generate tiles. The web2.0 based AJAX interface should work just fine.
Implementation Overview
While the client-side consists of no more than a simple web browser running an AJAX web-site, the server side consists of two parts.
1. A JAVA application used to calculate the star constellations and create the images necessary for the planetarium application.
2. A web server hosting an application written in JSP to serve the planetarium web site as well as the created images and the server time to the client.
Ciclope Astro itself is a huge project to control an astronomical observatory (telescopes, cameras, domes, etc.)

Solution #2: offline min online max
an offline working program|widget using a basic tile set but able to catch a full featured database when online

Solution #3: Port Stellarium
Stellarium would work perfectly for this. It shows the night sky for a specified location and time, lets you pan around and look at the different parts of the sky, labels stars/planets/moons, gives you the information you need to orient a telescope, and many other useful functions for stargazing.
Stellarium uses Qt, and some work currently exists to port it from general OpenGL to OpenGL ES, which would allow it to run on the N900. The N900 port could also use the current location by default, rather than having the user configure a location.

Solution #4: Port Kstars
Extremely powerful desktop astronomy application developed in KDE/QT (?). Can it be ported easily? Some folks apparently had this running even in custom N8xx environments, but it was slow. On the N900, maybe it would be reasonable (?).

Solution #5: Port MEphemeris
Python GTK+ application designed for the N8xx series. Not sure how trivial it would be to port to Maemo 5/N900. At the very least, it would require re-compiling the PyEphem python library heavily used by this application. Developer does not own a N900 at this point.


Solution #6: Port MChronos Applet
Python GTK+ home applet designed for the N8xx series. Not sure how trivial it would be to port to Maemo 5/N900. At the very least, it would require re-compiling the PyEphem python library heavily used by this application. This is more of an astronomical 'clock' applet that a 'planetarium' one, but does have a view of the night sky. Developer does not own a N900 at this point.


please feel free to share your ideas!