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Stellarium is a free open source desktop planetarium. It renders the skies in realtime using OpenGL, which means the skies will look exactly like what you see with your eyes, binoculars, or a small telescope. Stellarium is very simple to use, which is one of its biggest advantages: it can easily be used by beginners.
Stellarium is also used in planetariums.

The Stellarium project was started by Fabien Chéreau during the summer of 2001 and uses Sourceforge intensively. Anyone has the right to download and use the software for free, to distribute it without modifying to other people, or modify the source code, all of this under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).

• Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX


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Stellarium

Stellarium 0.10.0
September 22, 2008

Changelog & Notes:
The Stellarium team is proud to announce the release of version 0.10.0 beta. This major release is the result of 8 months of efforts totalizing almost 1000 commits from all team members.

The most important changes are the new redesigned GUI, an important performance and memory usage improvement, a faster start-up, as well as new features such as dynamic eye adaptation to bright objects, improved rendering, light pollution simulation or improved location selector.

The source code was also massively cleaned and refactored.
This version lacks 2 features from the previous releases, namely the text user interface and the script engine which are being recoded for a later release. It is therefore a beta release.

Changes:
- Global switch to Qt. Don't support SDL main application anymore.
- The whole StelApp class is managed by a QGraphicsScene, inside a QGraphicsView.
- Removed deprecated sources from the core of stellarium (old GUI, TUI and scripting).
- Continued API cleaning and simplifications.
- Performed large refactorings to use portable Qt API (migrated from std::string and std::wstring to QString).
- Re-organized the source files into sub-directories.
- Migrated config file parsing to a QSettings based implementation.
- Exposed some methods as slots so that they can be scripted in the future.
- Created the new Qt-based GUI button bars (QGraphicsItems).
- Recoded from scratch the new QWidget based GUI rendered in the QGraphicsView using style sheets.
- Moved stars/planets halo rendering into SkyDrawer.
- Implemented dynamic eye adaptation for bright objects.
- Optimized atmosphere computation and others, speed can be increased up to a factor of 2.
- Implemented light pollution following the Bortle scale index.
- Improved and optimized stars rendering (updated colors, sizes and added large halo for very bright ones, use GL lists for drawing stars by bunch)
- Made testing python wrappers using SIP (unused)
- Created a new SkyTile class supporting lazy dynamic multi-resolution images loading and display. Image trees can be stored as JSON files.
- Startup is much faster.
- Migrated the previous nebula textures to the new format.
- Added a LocationManager for managing observing locations and cleaned the code of observer.
- Changed key bindings, use F1.. F6 for opening dialogs.
- Tab completion on the search dialog.
- Added descriptions for the sky cultures and improved the ones for landscapes.
- Added a new mars landscape.
- Fixed many bugs.

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