ElChristou wrote:
t00fri wrote:
Since I can remember there has been the discussion among Amateur Astronomers (of which I am one), whether it is advantageous to switch the electronic gear displays to red night vision during field work with the telescope. Extensive studies have finally demonstrated that the effect is close to NIL. I have never use mine either...
My guess is the necessity or not of a "night vision" UI greatly depend on how people use the soft. I'm pretty sure many astronomers don't even look anymore to the sky when it's time to set up a computer assisted telescope, specially if one is looking for some DSO's or other very dim objects... For such use, of course such feature is useless.
We may also consider .Sci won't be used on the field, no interface to telescope, most features quite advanced with (for now) a strong focus on DSO's etc...
We may also consider .Sci will still be a good soft for the basics, so amateur astronomers could be tempted to use it outside as a sky map. For them a dim UI would be certainly welcome.
A night vision UI must have some good functional use, otherwise it wouldn't be worth the considerable development time it will cost! My above example with amateur telescopes was NOT meant as a real possible application of .Sci, but more as an illustration that even traditional uses of night vision eventually were recognized to be rather useless. It is related to the fact that such a typical red illumination also disturbes the total dark adaptation of the eye that is needed in astronomy for recognizing very fine objects. Anyway, my personal motivation for coding this is rather low, until we don't have a certain 'abundance' of coders in the team

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That said, .Sci UI won't be Celestia's UI. Eventually the global philosophy may well end to be a full screen use with integrated panels to the canvas. In such case, we need a visual good balance between the different elements so a dedicated "night vision" skin may well be not necessary at all...
Anyway, the topic being VERY low priority, the discussion is opened but no concrete result on this side should be expected for the near future.
Chris' writing may lead to the impression that we are still in the planning stage of the GUI of
.Sci. But actually we have already spent many weeks in the design and coding of .Sci's new UI in the beginning of 2013! While the new GUI may not yet be final, it doesn't need much more development for now, except perhaps some polishing here and there. It is quite clear that we will spent any free resources now to a further implementation of new astrophysical and cosmological visualization functionality, rather than to GUI polishing or even night vision.
Fridger