Using Stellarium to make an animation / video

(I don’t have a solution yet.)

I just wanted to show what the sky looks like over the course of a week.

On a Mac with Stellarium installed, I ran the following

/Applications/Stellarium.app/Contents/MacOS/stellarium --startup-script stellarium.ssc

with the following stellarium.ssc:

// -*- mode: javascript -*-
core.clear('natural');  // "atmosphere, landscape, no lines, labels or markers"
core.wait(5);
core.setObserverLocation('Ujjain, India');
core.setDate('1986-08-15T05:30:00', 'utc');
core.wait(5);
for (var i = 0; i < 2 * 24 * 7; i += 1) {
    core.setDate('+30 minutes');
    core.wait(0.5);
    core.screenshot('uj');
    core.wait(0.5);
}
core.wait(10);
core.quitStellarium();

It took a while (some 10–15 minutes) and created those 336 images in ~/Pictures/Stellarium/uj*, occupying a total size of about 550 MB. This seems a start, but Imagemagick etc. seem to choke on creating a GIF from such large data.

Giving up for now; would like to come back in future and figure out something better, that results in a smaller GIF.

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