Tuesday, March 17, 2020

D3-Celestial: Better Constellation Names

The next step to more flexible naming options constellations can now be displayed in many languages, helped greatly by this Wikipedia page with a table listing lots of them. Note that this is not from the original Wikipedia, where this page has been deleted; apparently it was too useful. You can select the constellation-language in the form below the map, and zoom in to any constellation in the other select box, where the displayed names are automatically adapted to the language-selection, amended with the IAU 3-letter designation for convenience.

These are the relevant options in the configuration object, all renamed from previous versions to better represent the actual meaning. Different parameter names in older versions are transformed automatically to preserve backward compatibility.

{
  constellations: {
    names: true,   // Show constellation names 
    namesType: "desig",   // What kind of name to show (default 3 letter designations)
    // Available options: (name) Official IAU name, (desig) 3-Letter-Designation, (lat) Latin, (en) English, (ar) Arabic, 
    //(cn) Chinese, (cz) Czech, (ee) Estonian, (fi) Finnish, (fr) French, (de) German, (gr) Greek, (il) Hebrew, 
    //(it) Italian, (jp) Japanese, (kr) Korean, (in) Marathi, (ir) Persian, (ru) Russian, (es) Spanish, (tr) Turkish
    // Different fonts for brighter & darker constellations
    nameStyle: { fill:"#cccc99", align: "center", baseline: "middle", opacity:0.8, 
                 font: ["14px 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif", 
                        "12px 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif",  
                        "11px 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"]},
    lines: true,   // Show constellation lines 
    lineStyle: { stroke: "#cccccc", width: 1.5, opacity: 0.6 },
    bounds: false,  // Show constellation boundaries 
    boundStyle: { stroke: "#ccff00", width: 1, opacity: 0.8, dash: [2, 4] }
}}

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