Nightshade Astronomy Simulation Software

Nightshade® is free, open source astronomy simulation and visualization software for teaching and exploring astronomy, Earth science, and related topics. Nightshade is based on the award-winning Stellarium software (which Digitalis also helped develop), but specficially tailored for digital planetarium and educator use.

The emphasis is on usability, realism, feature stability, and performance. It is backward compatible with scripts for Stellarium 0.8.2 and earlier using the StratoScript™ language developed and maintained by Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc.

Nightshade is currently available for Linux, Windows, Mac OSX, and other platforms.

Nightshade is developed by a community of volunteers. Digitalis spearheads the project, but Nightshade is vendor neutral.

Major differences between Nightshade on a Digitarium system and generic Stellarium:

• Numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements
• Greater configurability and attention to planetarium specific features
• Close integration with our uniquely intuitive remote control interface
• Enhanced starfield realism/configurability
• More solar system objects and higher resolution planet surfaces and nebula images
• Support for daylight savings and all world timezones
• Show moon or other body orbit visualizations (3D depth buffered for realism)
• Explore a planet from above
• Enhanced StratoScript automation features, such as:
  • Load solar system objects (such as natural or artificial satellites, asteroids, comets, etc.) from a script
  • Play videos from a script
  • Play a script from a USB drive, DVD-ROM, or the internal hard drive
• Lens distortion correction built in (Digitalis lenses)
• Support for distortion correction when the projector must be placed off-center
• Integration with our media display/distortion correction software
• Zoom to a location below the zenith for easier viewing
• No hardware or driver compatibility issues to deal with
• Automated software updates at your command
• Free technical support for the life of your Digitarium system

Read more about Nightshade or download it for free at http://NightshadeSoftware.org.

Nightshade 12

Digitalis developers are hard at work on Nightshade 12, which will be a major milestone for the project. Nightshade 12 will include:

• A terrain engine, for realistic and detailed terrain imagery and topographic data for select planets such as the Earth
• Guided or free flight through the solar system, to other stars, and even outside of the Milky Way galaxy
• Extensive 3d galaxy database
• Improved atmosphere rendering to encompass on and above Earth views
• The ability to view 3d models of irregular bodies such as asteroids or spacecraft, or even user loaded models such as chemical compounds

With the addition of these features, Nightshade will come close to matching proprietary planetarium software which is either only bundled with proprietary hardware or cost literally tens of thousands of dollars up front for a license and many thousands of dollars a year for (limited!) support and upgrades. Maybe we're crazy, but that just seems ridiculous to us. Why reinvent the wheel over and over again when everyone can just collaborate and get it done once? That's the power and promise of open source software.

We are targeting releasing Nightshade 12 around July 2012.

Nightshade is a registered trademark of Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc.