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.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I'm not quite subscribed to enough to have something to listen to for every hour on consciousness, but I'm getting there. I could wax lyrical about he medium, but instead I would just like to list a few of my favorites.

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.

In the last few weeks, Stellarium development has picked up a fair bit. Here are some screenshots for the curious. There'll no doubt be layout changes and style changes in the GUI before the release, but this might give some idea of what to expect.

	Stellarium 0.10.0 (SVN) with a couple of the new GUI elements visible
	The updated search dialog, now with tab selection of search results
	Updated light pollution simulation
	New configuration dialog

With the recent fairly OK weather over the last few weeks, I decided to do some more mapping for the Open Street Map project (OSM). I finally, after about a year's procrastination, got hold of a bicycle handlebar mount for my GPS unit and headed out onto the streets of York.

My previously severe but in remission case of Obsessive Compulsive Open Street Mapping Disorder (OCOSMD) has returned.

In eight days I've clocked up about 200 kilometers on the bike (and gotten a bit saddle sore in the process). I must feed the map! Having done most of the work last year, I finished off all the roads within the inner ring road, with the exception of a few tiny streets in the very centre of town where it is extremely difficult to get GPS reception because the old buildings almost touch one another above the streets, blocking the signals from the GPS constellation to my receiver. I think I got all the pubs, so if anyone out there wants to make a drinking map of central York, OSM is now able to provide that data. If I've missed a pub, mail me, or add it to the map yourself.

I've also made decent progress on the second stage - the zone between the inner and outer rind roads. This is a pretty big area - about 60 km², of which about ²/₃ is built up. I can only guess at the total distance I'll need to cycle before the roadways are complete - probably somewhere between 1500 and 2500 kilometers.

Here's a nice image showing where I've been (both last year and this year):

The scale of the image is such that is about 13 km across.

The interview is a nice introduction to the project for the general public, and good publicity for the project. They discuss the background of the project as well as a mapping event, which the public are encouraged to attend. Good work Andy! Audio available in MP3 format here (length 14:29).

About two and a half years ago I spent a little time investigating Linux software to generate panoramas from multiple smaller images. The best solution I found at that time was a combination of Hugin and Panotools, but it was a little fiddly to use and the results were good, but not perfect.

Today I tried again, using the same data and was amazed to discover just how much the software has improved.

Essentially, Hugin did everything for me completely automagically, and spat out a beautiful aligned and blended panorama.

The Stellarium team is proud to announce the release of version 0.9.1. This is primarily a bug fix and stabilization release. Apart from bug fixes, users can expect to see improved start-up times and a new sky culture (Tupi-Guarani) as well as some progress with translations and overall stability.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed - bug reporters, bug fixers, patch submitters, translators, package makers and donors.

The recent release of wine - version 0.9.48 - is able to run MSYS - the unix-like build environment for Win32 platforms. Initial test show that it is possible to successfully build win32 binaries although there are some rough edges. My goal is to be able to build Stellarium without having to take up half my memory with a VM running Windows.

The trick to being able to start msys is to run the msys.bat file inside a cmd.exe instance running in wine. Assuming the default install paths for all components, it's possible to start an msys terminal in a single command, like this:

wine cmd /c 'C:\msys\1.0\msys.bat'