Stellarium 0.22.1 does not display when closing the lid

[rudibr]

Hi,

I have Stellarium 0.22.1 running on a Windows 10 laptop in my observatory and it works superb from the observatory PC. However, if I close the observatorie laptop lid (to reduce light in the observatory) and control the observatory from another pc inside with Google Remote Desktop, then Stellarium does not paint it's content and the entiere Stellarium window rectangle is totally invissible.

If I start up Stellarium from my remo,te PC, then I see the splash screen, and it appears that nothing is happening. If I try to click anywhere on the desktop, nothing happens, because Stellarium is started up in full screen, and swallows the mouse events. If I press F11 to go from full screen to sizable window, then I see the Stellarium window with the caption bar, icon, "Stellarium 0.22.1" title and minimize, maximize and close buttons, but the window contents is black.

A work arround could be to throw a towl (I always carry a towl with me ;-) ) over the laptop screen in the observatoy, and not close the lid, but I would really like to close it fully.

Is there a setting in Stellarium or perhaps in Windows 10 that I can tweak to avoid this issue?

PS: I'm sorry, if this problem has already been reported. I have searched here, but found nothing about it.

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[gzotti]

Yes, another good reason to have a towel with you ;-) Presumably Stellarium needs a real display device attached. Usually, Laptops with closed lids are meant to be switched off.

[rudibr]

Yes, good old HG2G...

I kind of hope that the develpoers of Stellarium will look at this. All y other programs runs well and shows remote with the lid cloced. I could understand that it wasn't such a big deal, if it was an office program of some kind. But I doubt I'm the only one using Stellarium this way.

[rudibr]

... just made a clone of the repository and will see if I can make it build on my Win11 PC with VS2019 ;-)

[10110111]

I don't think Stellarium can do anything to prevent this. It seems to be the behavior of Windows, and I failed to find any ways to work around it in Windows settings.

See some ideas below.

• Try turning screen brightness to the minimum. Some laptops shut down their screen backlight at the lowest brightness level (though I only remember such behavior with Linux). If yours is like this, it's the way to go.

• I checked on a Windows 11 laptop with TightVNC instead of Google Remote Desktop, and there's no such problem here at all. Could TightVNC work better for you?

• Another option is to attach an external monitor (the cheapest you can find that has the correct connector for you laptop), make it the only monitor to display on so that the laptop's panel is off. After you have this setup working, simply turn the external monitor off by a button on its front panel. This way Windows most likely won't know that the external monitor is off. Caveat: I have experience with a DisplayPort-connected monitor that was detected as missing when I turned it off.

• Finally, if it all doesn't help, turn brightness down and incompletely close the lid, so that the screen doesn't turn off but shines down. Imperfect light shielding, but better than shining up.

[rudibr]

I don't think Stellarium can do anything to prevent this. It seems to be the behavior of Windows, and I failed to find any ways to work around it in Windows settings.

See some ideas below.

• Try turning screen brightness to the minimum. Some laptops shut down their screen backlight at the lowest brightness level (though I only remember such behavior with Linux). If yours is like this, it's the way to go.
• I checked on a Windows 11 laptop with TightVNC instead of Google Remote Desktop, and there's no such problem here at all. Could TightVNC work better for you?
• Another option is to attach an external monitor (the cheapest you can find that has the correct connector for you laptop), make it the only monitor to display on so that the laptop's panel is off. After you have this setup working, simply turn the external monitor off by a button on its front panel. This way Windows most likely won't know that the external monitor is off. Caveat: I have experience with a DisplayPort-connected monitor that was detected as missing when I turned it off.
• Finally, if it all doesn't help, turn brightness down and incompletely close the lid, so that the screen doesn't turn off but shines down. Imperfect light shielding, but better than shining up.

Thanks for the suggestions. Even with brughtness to a minimum and red night light, it will be detectable in the images I take with the telescope just 1 meter away. I will simply cover he laptop screen with a black cloth or cardboard .

[Pierreledoc]

Have you tried setting the close lid behaviour in Win 10? Settings-System-Power&Sleep-Additional Power Settings-Choose What Closing the Lid Does

[DaveAuld]

@rudibr I have also seen this behaviour on my laptops in the observatory when remoting into them with Chrome Remote Desktop.

I have also seen weird behaviour with Stellarium and N.I.N.A. Mouse actions and screen repaints were all over the place, including in Windows settings pages. I wasn't able to pin down the issues, but I did a scan of the windows system using DISM and SFC, this picked up 3 corrupt bluetooth drivers on both the machines which I found strange. Anyway, fixed with the scantools.

For Stellarium I also found that running it windowed in one of the other modes also helped.

Given the frequency of issues I was seeing, especially when they manifested half way through imaging sessions and required reboots to overcome it became quite tedious. I switched over from Chrome Remote Desktop to RustDesk and things seem to have normalised again and happy to close the laptop lid now. Previously I would run on minimum brightness and night light at full strength, but even that it was amazingly still bright in a dark observatory! I noticed the Windows11 night light isn't working properly either and sometimes doesn't turn off/on and the sunset and sunrise times, or change its brightness using the slider.

If you haven't tried RustDesk, I would recommend you give it a try. it is free.