I built an AI planetarium by adding a plugin to Stellarium

I wanted to say "show me Mars" to a planetarium and have it fly there. So I built Nebula: an AI assistant plugin for Stellarium, the open-source planetarium.

What it does

• Ask the sky: "show me Vega", "what does the sky look like at 9 pm?" and the view, time and zoom change.
• Guided tours: one click plans a five-stop tour of what's up now, with narration.
• Photo identification: upload a sky photo and get the objects named.
• Voice mode.

Demo, downloads (Windows and Linux) and source: https://nebula.aitklabs.in

How it works

Nebula is a Stellarium plugin written in C++/Qt, copied from the HelloStelModule template. It adds a chat window and talks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (or Anthropic).

The key design choice: the model never touches Stellarium directly. I prompt it to reply only with JSON like this:

{"say": "Vega is about 25 light-years away.", "actions": [{"type": "goto", "name": "Vega"}, {"type": "zoom", "fov": 20}]}