Ok, I got the images loaded. Now I have noticed that the face of the planets being presented is incorrect. I referred to Stellarium and the Mobile Observatory app on Android for comparison. Also simulating light speed is not enough to account for the discrepancy.
One other bug, when viewing a planet with Xplanet for the first time there is an error.
I did mention that there could easily be an issue with the planet feature predictions. That is probably an issue with either xplanet or an issue with the maps. Though I guess it could also be some issue with our parameters we are using for xplanet, but I would bet it is the maps. I am not an expert in xplanet, I only knew enough to get it working. I don't know if there are more accurate maps. The moon position predictions, though, I have found to be very good.
Loading the planets should not fail the first time, but it is possible. If xplanet takes more than 1 second to load the image, it might time out. I didn't want an issue with xplanet to completely freeze kstars, so I put a 1 second d timeout on it. One thing we could do is make use of another thread to accomplish the same task and provide more time to wait. If I do make some improvements to the xplanet viewer, I could add this too.
I did take a look at the documentation this evening and there is another parameter that we can use when xplanet is called that will make it faster, so it wont timeout.
Thank you it looks like a pretty interesting feature.
Would it be possible to implement lightspeed corrections? The delay Earth>Jupiter can be 33-53 minutes, enough time for features to be missed. The simulated view should account for that to match features we can see in the moment.
Presumably it should only require an ephemeris calculation to find the distance, divided by lightspeed to give the delay, then subtract that from the simulation time.