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.

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'

Since the release of version 0.9.0 of Stellarium easier this year, there have been over half a million direct downloads from the Stellarium website. The actual number of copies in use is rather harder to estimate, as there are no figures available for re-distribution of the software.

Re-distribution channels include sites such as softpedia and various Free software download archives, cover disks from magazines (computer and astronomy magazines), person-to-person copying and Linux distro packaging and distribution via software repositories.

The recent release of Stellarium version 0.9.0 has been quite a success. In the first two weeks after the release, Stellarium 0.9.0 has been downloaded over 92,000 times. The new version of the user guide nearly 9,000 times and the extra star catalogue packages over 7,000 times.

The total volume of data served totals a humungous 5 TiBytes! I'd like to thank Sourceforge for doing this for us. Bravo!

By far the most important new feature of the 0.9.0 release is the new star database. For users with a lot of memory and disk space, the new extra star catalogues mean Stellarium can display over 200 million stars (600 thousand in the default packages, the rest available as extra downloads). That's quite an increase from the previous 200 thousand in the previous release!

After nearly a year of work since the release of version 0.8.2, we released the latest and greatest version of Stellarium 2007-06-07.

At the recent developer meeting in Munich, Germany at the end of April, we agreed that we should release more often, and as such we should make an effort to release something as soon as possible. The result of this decision is version 0.9.0.

The last month has been a flurry of activity for all the developers. We managed to get a lot of really great stuff in the release.

The biggest change is the ability to use a HUGE star catalogues. Johannes Gajdosik took data from the Tycho, NOMAD and Hipparcos catalogues to build Stellarium's new star database. The default installer ships with over 600,000 stars, and extra catalogues (downloadable from sourceforge) weigh in at a massive 210 MILLION stars! You'll need a lot of RAM to hold all that data though.

Following the implementation of a rudimentary interactive Nebula texture editing system, I've been busy improving Stellarium's Nebula texture catalogue. The development version of Stellarium can display a great many more stars than the release version, and so it has been possible to do more accurate alignment of the nebula textures. It turns out the some of them were quite a way off...

It's quite a challenging task, even with the interactive nebular editor patch - looking at a photo of a nebula, star cluster or galaxy, which is super-imposed over a star field, and trying to work out how to scale it, rotate it and translate it so it fits with the star field.

Adding new nebula texture maps to Stellarium is quite possible because the file formats are open and well documented, but the process can be more than a little fiddly. This patch to the Stellarium development code-base provides key bindings which help users to align their nebula textures in an interactive way which is a lot more convenient than existing methods.

read more here...