Minecraft: Telescopes & Astronomy

Minecraft Telescopes & Astronomy Mod

(for the Caves & Cliffs update)

With the introduction of a spyglass to Minecraft in the upcoming Caves & Cliffs update, it sure would be nice to have some things to look at with the new telescope. In addition, new telescopes will be added with their own pros & cons.

-Handheld vs Mounted Telescopes: Handheld telescopes can be used as items, but aiming them is imprecise, and when walking with the handheld scope, the field of view will wobble and shake. As such they're limited to low magnifications. Mounted telescopes are entities which are placed like blocks and are used with the [use] button. They are stable and remain pointed where you last pointed them.

Items:

TELESCOPES & TELESCOPE ACCESSORIES
-Spyglass: Replaces vanilla telescope. This simple optic provides 5x magnification and a severely restricted field of view, and shows some false color fringing. Crafted the same way as the vanilla telescope.

-Astronomical Eyepieces: There are 6 possible eyepieces, each providing a different magnification. They are crafted with a piece of copper on the middle sides, with the center column varying in elements:
--pane, pane, pane: 5mm eyepiece
--pane, empty, pane: 10mm eyepiece
--block, empty, pane: 15mm eyepiece
--pane, block, block: 20mm eyepiece
--block, empty, block: 25mm eyepiece
--block, block, block: 30mm eyepiece
Used inside of an astronomical telescope, allowing the user to chose whatever magnification they want.

-Barlow lens: similar crafting recipe as eyepieces. These are simple magnification doublers.
--empty, empty, pane: 3.5x Barlow
--empty, pane, empty: 2.25x Barlow
--pane, empty, empty: 1.25x Barlow

-Image Erector Prism: Three crystal shards fill up the inside of a copper tube. This replaces the Barlow and can be used for images, which are slightly dimmer and with a slightly smaller field of view.

-Objective Lens: A 62.5mm f/16 (f=1 block=1000mm) objective for an astronomical telescope. It can be used handheld for starting fires when the sun is out. All telescopes using this lens have a small amount of false color fringing. Crafting recipe:
--crystal shard on top of a glass block

-Refractor Telescope Tube: Four copper bars along the sides, with an objective lens at the top. This item can not be used alone, but can be placed on a mount, and an eyepiece can be added through the mount menu.

-[n]x Refractor Telescope: These can be crafted one of two ways. Either a Barlow (or nothing) or an eyepiece is added to the middle and bottom slots of the crafting table when crafting an Astronomical Refractor Telescope, or the Astronomical Refractor Telescope can be placed at the top of the crafting table and either the barlow and an eyepiece, or an eyepiece alone, can be added below the refractor. This creates a handheld telescope of some magnification. I.e., if you added a 20mm eyepiece, it would become "50x Refractor Telescope" To remove the eyepiece and Barlow, either place the telescope on a mount (where its eyepiece and barlow can be taken off via the mount menu), or hit the telescope on a block, which will cause the eyepiece and barlow to pop out.

Finderscope: A small telescope with the aperture of the spyglass, but with a wide field of view, and a crosshair. Crafted by adding a crystal shard and two string to a spyglass. It can be used as a spyglass as is, but is designed to be attached to the larger scope. Can be crafted onto a crossbow to make a sniper crossbow.

REFLECTOR TELESCOPES:

Two types of reflectors are available: Metal and Glass.

Speculum Mixture Scrap: Crafted with two pieces of copper and one piece of iron. Three Speculum Mixture Scraps result.

Speculum Metal Ingot: One Speculum Mixture Scrap, smelted in a furnace, results in a Speculum Metal Ingot.

Wall Mirror: Crafted from four sticks surrounding a speculum metal ingot, this item-frame-sized object can be placed on a wall, and will show a reflection (dimmed by 60%) of its environment.

Small Speculum Telescope Mirror: a 120mm f/8 telescope mirror, 60% reflectivity. Crafted from three speculum ingots on the bottom, sand in the middle, and a piece of glass on the top. The glass is retained in the crafting menu when the mirror is crafted.

Small Reflecting Telescope: Copper ingots along the sides, small telescope mirror on the bottom, speculum metal ingot on the top. Can not be used hand-held, as the eyepiece is in the front.

Small Glass Telescope Mirror: a 120mm f/8 telescope mirror, uncoated glass. Crafted the same way as a speculum telescope mirror except with glass blocks instead of speculum.

OBSERVATORY-CLASS TELESCOPES

Small Metallized Telescope Mirror: a 125mm f/8 telescope mirror, 95% reflectivity. Result of metallizing a Small Glass Telescope Mirror.

Medium (250mm f/4) Telescope Mirror (Both Speculum and non-metallized Glass) are made by crafting together four small mirrors with more sand and another piece of glass. Large (500mm f/4) is made from four medium mirrors crafted together with more sand and glass. Enormous (1000mm f/4) is made from four Large mirrors with more sand and glass. A Large Telescope requires the approximate resource expenditure of 64 small telescopes.

Medium (125mm, f/16), Large, (250mm, f/16), and Huge (500mm, f/16) refractors are made using an analogous procedure but starting with small refractor objectives.

Mirror Coating Machine: Crafted with two iron blocks on the bottom, four along the sides, an empty center, a brewing stand at the bottom, and a dispenser at the top. Allows for the coating of telescope mirrors. Like the breweing stand, it takes blaze powder for fuel, and it takes iron nuggets to use for metallizing. Metallizing mirrors larger than a small mirror, takes additional blaze powder, iron nuggets, and time equivalent to the number of small mirrors they're made up of.

Enormous and Great telescopes replace copper ingots with copper blocks for the crafting recipe.

Large and Enormous reflectors can be made with no secondary mirror (iron ingot), and thus the speculum metal mirrors will not absorb as much light. However, this manifests as a sideways blur in the image at high powers.

MOUNTS:

All mounts have a menu, accessed by right clicking. The menu has four slots: Telescope, Finderscope, Barlow, and Eyepiece. It has three buttons: Tube Sight, Finderscope, Eyepiece. Finderscope and Eyepiece options are grayed out if no finderscope is attached. Clicking each will show you the view through each element. Tube Sight just sights down the tube with no magnification. Eyepiece shows you the view through the eyepiece. Finderscope shows you the view through the finderscope. A Finderscope or spyglass can be used as a finder. There are also up to  four inventory slots. (Intended to store eyepieces, but you could store anything there) While looking through one of the views, WASD will slew the telescope along its principle axes, shift acting as a slow motion and space acting as a high speed.

There are four mounts and a few variants:

-Tripod: The most basic: it just allows for a more steady version of the handheld experience. (Telescope is controlled with mouse motion rather than WASD, but there is no shake or wobble, and the telescope will stay where you leave it.) A Tripod can only mount small telescopes (120mm reflector, 62mm refractor)

-Altaz Mount: controls like a normal mount, with the principle axes being altitude and azimuth. Crafted with a tripod at the bottom-left or bottom-right of a T-cross of iron ingots with a copper ingot in the middle. The mount will display its Altitude and Azimuth pointing, and if a clock is placed in one of its inventory slots, sidereal time will be displayed as well.

-Equatorial Mount: An altaz mount with an iron ingot and an iron block (counterweight) out the side. Its principle axes are Right Ascension and Declination. The mount will display the Right Ascension and Declination values to the precision of one arcsecond (whether tracking or otherwise) If a clock is placed in one of its inventory slots, sidereal time will be displayed as well.
--Equatorial Tracking Mount: Crafting a clock and a piston with the EQ mount turns the mount into a clock-driven Tracking Mount. When given a redstone signal, this mount will track the rotation of the sky. If an additional clock is placed in one of its inventory slots, sidereal time will be displayed as well.

-Altaz Observatory Mount: Nine Altaz mounts together results in an Altaz Observatory Mount, which is twice the size and can mount much heavier telescopes.

-Equatorial Observatory Mount: Nine Equatorial Mounts together results in an Equatorial Observatory Mount, which is twice the size and can mount much heavier telescopes. Equatorial Tracking version still needs only one additional clock and piston.

-Dobsonian Mount: This one only works with its telescope permanently attached, but is interacted with as if it were a full mount. It works the same as an altaz mount. No slow-motions. Crafted with a U-shape of wooden planks with a telescope on the top spot. Dobsonians can be made up to any size of reflector. Logs replace planks in the Enormous dob. The small reflector will be a tabletop mount.

MOUNTS AND REDSTONE

Each mount has five directions which redstone can act upon.
-The BOTTOM and SOUTH side is the redstone input for a clock drive.
-The EAST side is the output for Right Ascension or Azimuth.
-The WEST side is the output for Declination or Altitude.
-The NORTH side is the output for a sensor.

A sensor is crafted by putting a light sensor block, redstone dust, and Eye of Ender into a copper tube as you would with lenses in an eyepiece. The light it detects will power the North side of the telescope's mount, so you could use it to detect whether the telescope is looking at the Moon, a Star, or the Sun.

PHOTOGRAPHY (stretch goal)
A brief description: silver ore is added, and silver replaces iron in telescope metallizing. Silver can be used to craft Film. Cameras can be crafted using lenses to take pixelated photographs. The Film can then be processed somehow, and turned into photographs which can be hung on walls.
A camera crafted into a telescope eyepiece (copper tube) can be used to take astrophotos.
Eyes of Ender can be used to make television screens which will show a live view of some paired camera, and they can also be turned into telescope accessories.

TELESCOPE OPTICS
Telescopes have three properties which determine the views you see: Aperture, Focal Length, and Transmission. Refractors and Metallized mirrors have 95% transmission, Speculum mirrors have 60% transmission (thus speculum newtonians have 36% transmission)
Aperture determines resolution. In the real world, a low resolution would be a blurry image. Because it's minecraft, the image is instead more pixellated for a low resolution.
Refractors will have a small amount of color fringing. The spyglass has a LOT of color fringing.
Focal Length determines the magnification as used with a given eyepiece, to the tune of magnification = focal length of telescope * magnification factor of Barlow / focal length of eyepiece.

ASTRONOMY

The first major change to the sky is that it moves on different, misaligned axes. The Moon & Sun rotate at 23.5 degrees off of the equator, and the equator is only aligned at 0,0. When moving North or South, the equator will become misaligned such that at the world border, the equator rotates around the horizon. (As if at the North or South pole)

In addition, the Moon and the Sun have a smaller apparent size. This is the next most obvious change.

And the Moon will also move around the sky in accordance with its phase. When it is New, it will be next to the Sun. When it is full, it will be at opposition. When it is waning, it will be visible in the morning, when it is waxing, it will be visible in the afternoon.

Stars are randomly distributed across the sky with an inverse relationship between number and brightness. Only a few very bright stars exist, but most stars are dim and tiny. The majority of stars are only visible with a telescope. The phase of the moon modulates star brightness.

In addition to stars, there are planets. These appear as stars, except they move across the heavens from night to night. Pointing a telescope at them reveals their true form.

There are also several hundred Deep Sky Objects. Each one has four levels of detail, to be investigated with different magnifications. These include star fields, open star clusters, globular star clusters, emission nebulae, planetary nebulae, and spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, and peculiar galaxies. They are all either hand-painted, or edited from real space imagery, or some combination of both. To save on repetitions, some globular clusters and elliptical galaxies might have repeating textures.

Stars, deep sky objects, and planets are all randomly distributed in each new world based upon the world seed.

WEATHER: Sometimes, the skies will be completely clear, with no clouds at all.

Seasonal variation in temperature (in a harder-core survival game) and farming practices would go hand in hand with astronomy, and make an understanding of astronomy vital in keeping track of the time of year.

ECLIPSES: Both solar eclipses and lunar eclipses are possible. During a total solar eclipse, mobs will spawn during the day, though they're likely to die off after totality ends after a minute or so. During a lunar eclipse, when the Moon becomes dark and red, local difficulty increases, mobs become stronger and more of them spawn. On average there are about one of each every solar year.

The brightness of sky visible to the player (and thus the brightness of stars and deep sky objects) depends upon the average surface light level of the nearest few chunks. Dark skies and dark surroundings are needed to do the best observing.

TIME and TELESCOPES
As a toggleable feature, time will be slowed down when using a telescope in singleplayer, or if all players in multiplayer are using a telescope. Or possibly, time could slow down only for the player using the telescope, and when they're done, they snap back to present time? Time will be slowed down such that the minecraft day equals a real day. Otherwise, tracking objects at high powers might be impossible. The only other option would be to restructure the mount system so that all mounts are capable of equatorial tracking automatically.

USING TELESCOPES AT NIGHT

Because telescopes are best used at night and in the dark, and minecraft has this fun thing where the night just overwhelmingly sucks, special precautions must be taken to observe safely.

Redstone torch behavior is changed, so that it produces dim VISIBLE light, but has the same mob-spawn-thwarting power of a normal torch.

Bane of Monsters is another way to prevent mob spawns. It is a treasure find, and takes the form of a block. Mob drops are added to the Bane of Monsters, and they will consume them as fuel, preventing mob spawning as long as it has that fuel to burn. For example, adding spider eyes (not string) to a Bane of Monsters will prevent spiders spawning, adding rotten flesh will prevent zombies spawning, etc.