zstarview 0.24.4

Transparent desktop sky viewer with stars, planets, eclipses, and optional real-time satellite cloud overlay.

zstarview

Transparent desktop sky viewer with stars, planets, eclipses, optional real-time satellite cloud overlay, and optional terrain horizon overlay.

Install

Recommended:

pipx install zstarview

Or with pip:

pip install zstarview

Quick Start

zstarview [options] [city]

Examples:

zstarview Tokyo
zstarview "35.68;139.76"
zstarview -Z E -A 25 Tokyo

Highlights

• Real-time rendering of bright stars, planets, celestial equator, and ecliptic.
• Optional deep-sky object (DSO) overlays.
• Optional asterism overlays (line patterns, not IAU constellation boundaries).
• Real-time cloud overlays from Himawari/GOES (can be disabled with -c 0).
• Optional terrain horizon overlay from Copernicus DEM (can be disabled with --terrain-horizon-opacity 0).
• Hover interactions for object labels and contextual overlays.

Useful Options

• -V, --vmag-limit: star magnitude limit.
• --datetime "YYYY-MM-DD HH[:MM[:SS]] [TZ]": absolute sky time.
• --show-dso-initial true|false: DSO visibility at startup.
• --show-asterisms-initial true|false: asterism visibility at startup.
• -c, --cloud-opacity: cloud overlay opacity (0 disables clouds).
• --terrain-horizon-opacity: terrain horizon opacity (0 disables DEM download and terrain rendering).

Notes

• On first launch, ephemeris data may be downloaded once and cached.
• Terrain horizon rendering downloads Copernicus DEM tiles on first use and then reuses the local cache.
• If cloud fetching is slow or unavailable, use -c 0 for offline-friendly star/planet viewing.

Links

• Homepage: https://github.com/tos-kamiya/zstarview
• Documentation: https://github.com/tos-kamiya/zstarview#readme
• Issues: https://github.com/tos-kamiya/zstarview/issues