🌟 Gaia Stars for CosmoScout VR

This repository contains a script which downloads star data from the Gaia Data Release 3 from ESA's Gaia mission and writes a few million brightest stars to a CSV file.

As CosmoScout VR is currently not able to display all billions of stars from the catalog, a subset of the brightest stars is generated. Since the script takes very long to run, we provide pre-generated cataloge subsets as a download here.

You can choose between 1, 2.5, 5, 10, and 25 million brightest stars (filtered according to the G-band mean magnitude).

Data Format

To reduce the data size, only the columns required by CosmoScout VR are included in the CSV files. The CSV header looks like this:

| sourceid | hipparcosid | ra | dec | parallax | photgmeanmag | bprp | | --------- | ------------ | --- | --- | -------- | --------------- | ----- |

Download Pre-Generated Data and Configuration

CosmoScout VR downloads the five-million dataset per default. If you want to use less or more stars, download the respective CSV file from the releases section and configure the csp-stars plugin like this:

json5 "csp-stars": { "celestialGridTexture": "../share/resources/textures/celestial_grid.png", "starFiguresTexture": "../share/resources/textures/constellation_figures.png", "celestialGridColor": [0.5, 0.8, 1.0, 0.3], "starFiguresColor": [0.5, 1.0, 0.8, 0.3], "starTexture": "../share/resources/textures/star.png", "hipparcosCatalog": "../share/download/stars/hip_main.dat", "gaiaCatalog": "path/to/the/file.csv" // <-- put the path to your CSV file here },

[!NOTE] If you changed the path to a different CSV file, you will have delete the star_cache.dat next to CosmoScout VR's executable. Else CosmoScout VR will not reload the new CSV file.

Running the Script

If you want to generate the CSV file yourself, you can run the script like this:

bash python3 extract_brightest_stars_from_gaia_gdr3.py

This will download the Gaia Data Release 3 chunk by chunk and write the 5 million brightest stars to a CSV file. The numbers of stars (and some other parameters) can be adjusted in the script.

Attribution

This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.