Planetary surfaces, keyframed camera, new scripting and more
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.
Gaia Sky gets keyframe-based camera paths
During the last months I have been working on a QOL improvement for Gaia Sky video production. Currently, Gaia Sky offers a couple of ways to persist and reproduce camera behaviours: scripting and camera paths. Scripting offers a high level API which allows for the interaction and manipulation of the internal state. Conceptually, a running script is no different from a regular user. A script runs in its own thread and, like a user, interacts with Gaia Sky's core through the event manager, a message-passing entity which encapsulates the core functionality.
Jumbo release 1.5.0 brings lots of new features and improvements
This time around we've had a slightly longer development cycle so Gaia Sky 1.5.0 ‘Jumbo Summer Release’ is here with a ton of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. Most importantly, we have essentially refactored the way star catalogs are handled, so that we can now stream data from disk when it is needed. Also, we've been working hard to make better use of the GPU and we are proud to announce that we've increased the performance fourfold while being able to display many more objects on screen at once.
Version 1.0.2 brings spacecraft mode, lens glow, 360° and lots of bugfixes
Gaia Sky is here again with a brand new release packed with new features and bug fixes. Here are the most important:
Astronomy Picture of the Day features Gaia Sky
Today, 26 September 2016, the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) features a video we have prepared with Gaia Sky at the ARI/Uni Heidelberg. The video itself shows a flight from outside of our Milky Way galaxy to the Sun and then a travel through the Solar System towards the vicinity of the Earth, displaying in this journey a little over 600.000 stars from the TGAS part of Gaia Data Release 1.
Personal website and portfolio
I am a Software Engineer interested in astrophysics and scientific visualisation. I live in Heidelberg (Germany) and struggle to learn the language and comprehend German culture. I'm currently working on CU3/CU9/Gaia at ARI/ZAH@Uni-Heidelberg and I'm also a Ph.D. candidate at the viscomp group, IWR@Uni-Heidelberg.