Category: Gaia Sky

A couple of years ago I wrote about the procedurally generated planets in Gaia Sky. In this post, I provided a more or less detailed technical overview of the process used to procedurally generate planetary surfaces and cloud layers.

Since then, we have used the system to spice up the planets in the planetary systems for which the Gaia satellite could determine reasonable orbits (see the data here, and some Gaia Sky datasets for some of those systems here, including HD81040, Gl876, and more).

However, with the upcoming Gaia DR4, the number of candidate exoplanets is expected to increase significantly, rendering the “one dataset per system” approach unmaintainable. In this post I describe some of the improvements made with regards to exoplanets in Gaia Sky, in both the handling of large numbers of extrasolar systems seamlessly, and in the brand new, improved procedural generation of planetary surfaces and clouds.

In these last few days I have merged a huge internal refactoring into Gaia Sky’s master branch. This refactoring has been cooking for several months and has adapted or completely replaced virtually every piece in the code base. Read on if you want to know more.

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