Night Sky on other planets

I've done this in Traveller 2300 quite a bit: Sky Map and an example of the Day/Night cycle from a specific point on Koromon. I spent a long time - years - trying to reconcile the 2d traveller universe with 3d viewpoints and finally gave up on it (in part because OTU traveller players are somewhat luddite as a rule when it comes to realistic astronomy). A perhaps more stylized example - this one plotting the sky from the sun's position with Traveller 2300 star coordinates (which don't quite match the real world).

I end up just writing tools myself - the examples above are in mathematica, I just take the 3d coordinates, translate them to the appropriate point, rotate them if I want to (if the local orbital plane and axis normal are known), then do a cartesian->spherical and map those points. I trained a machine classifier to approximate star color from magnitude or luminosity and sequence, and just calculate apparent magnitude the usual way. This has the advantage of most other tools that might currently exist because you can fit whatever you want into the sky map - I often have orbiting spacecraft drawn (with magnitudes computed as well) to find local communications satellite or survey satellite coverage.

/r/traveller Thread