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Planetarium and educational astronomy with open source |
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Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc. has officially launched Nightshade, an open source astronomy simulation and visualization software designed for digital planetarium and educator use. Nightshade offers a realistic simulation of the sky, rendering over 100,000 stars and in situ images of deep sky objects of note, including many Hubble Space Telescope images. On Nightshare, users can explore the solar system from many perspectives: visiting far-off moons, zooming in on planetary features, or tracing orbits and trails, for example. Constellations from many different cultures are included, and the software is internationalized to support more than 40 different languages. The software is highly customizable for differing preferences and applications. Nightshade is a fork of Stellarium, to which Digitalis was a large contributor. Over time, the project's focus shifted in ways that were counterproductive to features critical to planetariums. Code and technology changes over the years made it almost impossible to backport Digitalis' improvements to Stellarium, which, after much reflection, prompted Digitalis to officially release a customized version of Stellarium as an entirely separate community-supported project. "A fork is always a difficult situation in the open source world," said Robert Spearman, Digitalis President and co-founder. "We bear no ill will towards the Stellarium project, but for many reasons we feel this is the only way to guarantee that the needs of the planetarium community will be listened to. Now, with a growing community and a clean slate to start from, I think Nightshade can really take off." Founded in 2003, Digitalis creates tools for astronomy education and provides digital planetarium systems for the portable and small fixed-dome market. Spearheaded by Digitalis, the Nightshade project is supported by a growing community of planetarium professionals and organizations, including early participants Nizhniy Novgorod Planetarium (Russian Federation) and Lionel Ruiz of the Observatoire de Marseille (France). In its statement, the company appealed for users and volunteers to add value not just through software development by also for translating, testing, suggesting features, providing more sky culture information, designing culture-appropriate constellation art, creating scripts and documentation, etc. Nightshade is available for Linux, Windows, with a Mac OS X version planned as well, and is backward compatible with scripts for Stellarium 0.8.2 and earlier, using the StratoScript(TM) language developed and maintained by Digitalis. |
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