First version of Gaia Sky released in conjunction with Gaia DR1

Last September 14 the first Gaia catalog, Gaia Data Release 1, was made public. To celebrate the occasion, we also released version 1.0.0 of our virtual Universe software, Gaia Sky. This time around, the software comes with big improvements and lots of new features, the most prominent of which is the addition of the TGAS catalog, a part of Gaia DR1 which contains 3D positions for approximately 2 million objects. Check out the release trailer.

Here is the changelog. As always, for a full list of changes see here.

• TGAS is now the default catalog. HYG can still be selected from the data tab in the config dialog.
• We can now also lock the orientation of the camera to that of the focus.
• Added new options to control star appearance (point size, minimum opacity, etc.).
• Added sliders to control draw distance in Level-of-detail catalogues such as TGAS.
• Added new Planetarium mode.
• Added new red-cyan anaglyphic 3D mode.
• Added distortion in VR-headset 3D mode.
• Lots of bug fixes and adjustments.

You can download the Linux (deb, rpm, installer, aur), Windows (32 and 64 bit version) or MacOS X versions here.