IceCube GCN Notive Wallpaper Generator

stellarium-gcn-wp is a script to automatically generate and set a desktop wallpaper for an IceCube GCN notice using stellarium.

The generated wallpapers show a rendering of the sky from an observers position (by default, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the south pole), at the time the neutrino event occurred. The position and some information about the event is marked in the image.

Requirements

This will (probably) only work on Linux. These external dependencies need to be installed:

• Stellarium, which is used to render the images
• Xvfb, which is used to run stellarium in the background
• xdotool, to control the stellarium window inside Xvfb

Additionally, you will need a client_id and client_secret to subscribe to GCN notices. You can sign up to receive notices on the NASA GCN website

Quickstart

• Add your client_id and client_secret to settings.py
• Look through settings.py for any other configuration changes you might want to make
  • out_file_name controlls where the rendered images get saved to
  • If you don't run KDE, you'll want to set post_render_callback option to something that sets a wallpaper for your desktop environment (or does whatever else you want with the image). Functions for setting KDE and Gnome3 desktop backgrounds are included in hooks.py
• Run poetry install
• Run poetry run stellarium-gcn-wp -s track --init-tracking
  • This will initialize tracking GCN notices to start at the most recent one
• Run poetry run stellarium-gcn-wp -s track
  • This will run indefinitely. Whenever a GCN notive is received, a new wallpaper will be generated and set according to your configuration
• If you just want to generate one wallpaper right now, you can run poetry run stellarium-gcn-wp -s last -1 instead of the previous two commands