Since my last post here, there have been two minor releases of Stellarium. 0.10.1 was a bugfix release, and 0.10.2 followed the release of QT4.5, which fixed some problems on the Mac, improved performance somewhat and generally made life a little easier.

More exciting however, is the sudden increase in development of new features. For a while now I've been saying in project news items and here on porpoisehead.net that the years of re-structuring of Stellarium's code is going to make it a lot easier to develop new features. I realise that after the third time saying this that we better actually get round to developing some new features, else the user base will start to lose enthusiasm for the project. Well, it seems to be paying off.

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During February and March, we have been fortunate to attract code from a few new contributers. Timothy Reaves has written a very nice plugin called Ocular which simulates the view one might expect using different telescope setups.

This feature has been requested quite a few times in the past, and it was sort of possible to accomplish the same thing by turning on the disc viewport, and setting the field of view. However, this was cumbersome and not really very precise. Tim's plugin is a really nice feature for amateur astronomers and educators, and I think it will prove to be a real asset to the project.

Meanwhile, Bogdan Marinov has been working hard on making a GUI-based tool for configuring and controlling telescope mounts. Good progress has been made, and a prototype which I used made it clear that this feature will greatly improve access to the telescope control feature. I can't wait to see the final version

Lastly, I've been busy working on a Satellite prediction plugin.

The plugin takes Satellite orbital elements in the form of NORAD TLE (two line element) data, and calculates the position of various satellites in Earth orbit. TLE data is automatically updated from sites on the net as satellite orbits are boosted, or change over time.

What I really want to do now is use all three of these new features together... I would like to set up a telescope which is controlled by Stellarium (configured using Bogdan's telescope GUI), and track the ISS... comparing the view from the real telescope with the view simulated using the Ocular plugin.

Ah... geek fun.

All the plugins mentioned in this article can be downloaded for Windows and Linux (x86) from the links found on the Stellarium wiki Downloads page. In future release of Stellarium, these plugins will be included in the main program package.