Gaia Sky is an open-source

astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...

visualisation desktop and VR program with versions for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

. It is created and developed by Toni Sagristà Sellés in the framework of

ESA , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (1205 ...

Gaia In Greek mythology, Gaia (; from Ancient Greek , a poetical form of , 'land' or 'earth'),, , . also spelled Gaea , is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenog ...

mission to create a billion-star multi-dimensional map of our

Milky Way Galaxy The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. ...

, in the Gaia group of the

Astronomisches Rechen-Institut The Astronomical Calculation Institute (german: Astronomisches Rechen-Institut; ARI) is a research institute in Heidelberg, Germany, dating from the 1700s. Beginning in 2005, the ARI became part of the Center for Astronomy at Heidelberg Univers ...

(ZAH, Universität Heidelberg). Gaia Sky is a product of the outreach working group of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. The software is released under the

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...

The inner workings of Gaia Sky are described in detail in the paper ''Gaia Sky: Navigating the Gaia Catalog.'' Gaia Sky offers many advanced features like the stereoscopic (3D), planetarium and panorama renderers. It also works with virtual reality headsets through SteamVR, is fully scriptable with Python and features game controller support that makes it possible to operate it even with a racing wheel. Gaia Sky is used by ESA to aid in the video production of Gaia Data Releases. A video made with Gaia Sky was also featured in the Astronomy Picture of the Day website.

Data

The installer packages of Gaia Sky contain the program but no data at all. In order to use Gaia Sky, at least a download of the base data package, containing the Solar System with low-resolution textures, is necessary. Gaia Sky offers a built-in download manager which connects to the servers at the

in Heidelberg to fetch the desired datasets. The downloading and deploying processes are seamless to the user. Several datasets are available, offering higher resolution textures, different cuts of the Gaia eDR3 catalog (up to 1.46 billion stars), other star catalogs such as the

Hipparcos ''Hipparcos'' was a scientific satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 1989 and operated until 1993. It was the first space experiment devoted to precision astrometry, the accurate measurement of the positions of celestial obj ...

catalog, different galaxy maps (dust, HII regions, etc.),

nebula A nebula ('cloud' or 'fog' in Latin; pl. nebulae, nebulæ or nebulas) is a distinct luminescent part of interstellar medium, which can consist of ionized, neutral or molecular hydrogen and also cosmic dust. Nebulae are often star-forming regio ...

e or extragalactic catalogs such as NBG or

Sloan Digital Sky Survey The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-spectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. The project began in 2000 a ...

. All datasets are specified in

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

files following a comprehensible and well documented format.

References

External links

Official websiteGaia Sky source repositoryOfficial documentationRelease listAUR packageFlatpak (Flathub link)Version 3.0.0 teaser trailer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gaia Sky (Planetarium software) Free educational software Planetarium software for Linux Science software for macOS Educational software for Linux Educational software for Windows Free astronomy software Cross-platform free software Science software for Linux Science software for Windows Freeware