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.

Less than 5 weeks after release, Stellarium 0.10.0 has had just shy of a quarter of a million downloads. This number includes downloads for Windows, OSX and source code, and was gathered from both the sourceforge site statistics, and some of a more popular freeware software sites which redistribute the program.

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.

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.