Seems like the software world isn't the only one in which weird patents crop up... Hysterical Patents documents an interesting selection of weird and wonderful patents collected by the late attorney Edward D. O'Brien.

Stellarium 0.10.3 has finally been released (Windows + source for *nix... OSX binaries to follow).

This release includes my Satellites plugin by default (although you have to enable it manually). Also, the script console is included, although there are some known bugs still with the scripting engine (whoops!). I'm working on it... :-)

Recently there seems to have been an increase in the number of people contacting me about Stellarium being sold - on auction sites or in one case as part of a package from a "name a star" business. My stance on this is that so long as the sellers abide by the terms of the GPL license, there's little reason to get upset about it.

It's legally OK for anyone to re-distribute Stellarium and charge a reasonable fee for such distribution, provided that the terms of the GPL are met - most importantly in my eyes that sourcecode is distributed as well as binaries (including all modified source), that copyrights are not modified in any way, and that derivative works are licensed under the GPL. Sellers are also not allowed to claim or imply that Stellarium is their own work.

Work continues apace on the "new" Stellarium script engine. As part of my work on this I found my workflow a little inefficient - switching between Stellarium and vim in a terminal all the time to edit scripts and then re-run them.

What better then, than to spend a little time making an integrated script editor tool inside Stellarium?

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.

After a lot of work, we managed to release version 0.10.0 of Stellarium - the planetarium for your desktop computer.

There were some sticky problems which we had to sort out with the hosting of the web site... Sourceforge's recent migration has caused a few headaches which were rather badly timed, but it all seems to be running pretty smoothly now.

Progress has continued fast in the last few weeks. The two new features which will be most visible are luminance adaptation and dynamic object labeling.

Luminance Adaptation

This feature is part of an overhaul of the calculation of brightness of objects. When enabled it dims all objects when a very bright object is visible. Thus, when the full moon is visible, dim stars will drop out of view.

This should not be confused with scattering of light in the atmosphere when a bright object like the full moon is in the sky, or because of light pollution - that effect brightens the sky, overwhelming the brightness of dim objects, and is only in effect when atmosphere is turned on. By contrast, luminance adaptation is effective even with atmosphere turned off.

I just finished another example Stellarium plugin. This one might actually be useful, although it would benefit from having a few configuration options.

The plugin allows the user to measure angular distance. For example, the plugin might be used to measure the apparent size of a planet:

When installed the measurement tool can be toggled on and off using the control-A key. When turned on, the left mouse drag action changes to drawing the measurement line. The right button click is used to clear the current line. Turning off the tool with a press of control-A will revert the mouse actions to normal behavior.

One of the recently added features of Stellarium is a plugin system. Although the feature has been present since the 0.9.x series of releases, it has not been widely advertised or used. Part of the reason for this is that it is a new feature, and part of the reason is the heavy re-structuring of the core Stellarium code, making the code-base a little too unstable for easy maintenance of plugins.