Category: Gaia Sky

In the past few weeks I have been implementing a couple of features into Gaia Sky. The first is the addition of variable star rendering. The second is the re-implementation of all point cloud render systems to use actual geometry (triangles) instead of point primitives. This post briefly offers a preview of these features.

Over the last two weeks I have released the feature-packed version 3.1.0 of Gaia Sky. Two bugfix releases (3.1.1 and 3.1.2) followed shortly to fix bugs and regressions introduced in the former. This post contains a small rundown of the most interesting features in these three new versions. Let’s get started.

In this post, I’m mirroring the Gaia Sky 3 tutorial I wrote for the official Gaia Sky documentation to use as a rough script for the workshop given in a splinter session of the 2021 DPAC consortium online meeting held on March 17 and 18, 2021. You can find the original page here.

It’s been a while since I last talked about new Gaia Sky releases. Today I’m doing a recap of the last four releases, starting with 3.0.0. This very verison came out with Gaia eDR3 on Dec 3, 2020. It was a big jump for Gaia Sky, as it introduced a plethora of new features and QOL improvements along with lots of bug fixes and little tweaks. This post goes over the latest versions from 3.0.0 to 3.0.3, and reflects on what they brought to the table.

Jump to the analysis for each of the versions directly:

• 3.0.0
• 3.0.1
• 3.0.2
• 3.0.3

A while ago Erwan Leroy, a VFX professional and trainer, contacted me with some questions regarding the catalogs in Gaia Sky. Basically, he was trying to decode the binary format used in Gaia Sky to load the stars using a Python script. Of course, my documentation was lacking in that very aspect, so I walked him through the format and then improved the docs. Today, he has come back to me to share his results.

Today we are releasing a brand new version (2.2.0) of Gaia Sky with several major changes and new features. To sum up, github reports 1071 changed files, with 81672 additions and 31763 deletions. Gitlab displays a “Too many changes to show” banner, as their cap is at a 1000 files. This makes it by far the largest release ever, followed by version 1.5.0 in the summer of 2017.