--- Description ---

Astroto is a astrophotography story-based simulator which means it's a game about taking pictures of space with a story as a grounding element.

--- Mechanics/Controls ---

Controls are W/A/S/D for player movement, and camera/telescope rotation; E to interact R to reset camera/telescope rotation, and SPACE  to take a picture while using the camera

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So far there are four main mechanics

1. Photo Capturing

Hold on to your britches, this is a long one.

After you press SPACE, it converts the cartesian(XYZ) coordinates to Equatorial(Eq) coordinates. Eq coordinates are a coordinate system a lot of astronomers, and astrophotographers use for telescopes. It then uses a web browser emulator called Selenium in headless mode(Which makes it not actually open a window). Then it loads a website I made that uses an API called Aladin, which is just like a starmap. It then punches in the converted coordinates and an FOV,  and takes and saves a screenshot to a folder which you can access, which means you can edit, and share the image to anyone.

2. The sky/stars

This one isn't as long.

At the beginning of the main scene a script is called that instances spheres using GPU instancing at positions found using the SIMBAD query system. Then using star magnitudes, it changes the size of the spheres.

3. Capture Settings/Pre Processing

When using an actual camera for real astrophotography, people use a format known as RAW, think of RAW as the purest form of the image, no compression, no conversion, no nothing just straight out of a camera. One aspect of cameras for a lot of different types of photography, astrophotography included; are the capture settings. You have the main ones shutter speed, and ISO. I have those ones so far, The implementation is simple, it just brightens the image and adds affects based on how high shutter speed, and ISO are.

4. Editing The Image

Currently, photo editing is pretty rudimentary. It's just stretching the photo, which is like brightening the image.

--- Storyline --

The story is still in development