rgl.sphglobe: Create a World, Night Sky or CMB Globe

In asgr/sphereplot: Spherical Plotting

Create a World, Night Sky or CMB Globe

Description

Plots a background map of either the World (our Earth), night sky, or the Planck CMB map. This is nice for certain visualisations of the astronomical locations, and also plotting the world.

Usage

rgl.sphglobe(type = "sky1", radius = 1, res = 100, alpha = 0.99999, grid = TRUE,
  lit = FALSE, texture = NULL, longshift = 0, longtype = 'D', ...)

Arguments

type	Character scalar; used if texture is NULL. One of: sky1 (low res) / sky2 (high res) / world1 (Light) / world2 (Dark) / world3 (simple) / cmb_gal (Planck in Galactic) / cmb_eq (Planck in Equatorial).
radius	Numeric scalar; radius to make the globe. If set to 'auto' it will be 1 for sky1 / sky2; 6371 for world1 / world2 (Earth radius in km); 13.8 for CMB (age of the Universe in Gyrs).
res	Numeric scalar; resolution of the globe (default should usually be fine).
alpha	Numeric scalar; transparency of the globe. Setting to 1 slows down the rendering for some reason.
grid	Logical; show coordinate grid?
lit	Logical; illuminate the globe?
texture	Character scalar; path to a texture to wrap onto the globe. This needs to be a rectangular projection to display correctly.
longshift	Shift to make to the texture in degrees along the longitude dimension. Many images are centred at either 0 or 180, where the default of 0 assumes 0 degrees longitude is at the centre of the texture. Only relevant if user provides input to texture.
longtype	Specifies if longitudes should be labelled in hours (H- default) or degrees (D). See rgl.sphgrid.
...	Extra arguments for rgl.sphgrid.

Details

Run for the side effect of generating a pretty globe to plot on top of.

The sky and World images are in the equatorial system, but I can only find Planck maps using a Galactic projection, so this is not in equatorial! But for giving the general impression of the CMB background, this might not matter.

All images were found online under open licenses. In particular the sky images were provided by NASA.

Value

Run for the side effect of generating a pretty globe to plot on top of.

Author(s)

Aaron Robotham

See Also

rgl.sphgrid, rgl.sphline

Examples

## Not run: 
rgl.sphglobe('world1')
rgl.sphglobe('world2')
rgl.sphglobe('world3')
rgl.sphglobe('sky1')
rgl.sphglobe('sky2')
rgl.sphglobe('cmb')

## End(Not run)

asgr/sphereplot documentation built on Sept. 5, 2023, 4:58 a.m.