As of today, we have consolidated the three Gaia DR3 black hole datasets (BH1, with key system-gaia-bh1, BH2, with key system-gaia-bh2, and BH3, with key system-gaia-bh3) into a single dataset that contains all three systems. The new dataset is called “Gaia black holes” and has the key system-gaia-bhs.
Below is the link to the new black holes dataset in the resources section. As always, the dataset is already available for download from the datasets manager. We strongly recommend to delete the old system-gaia-bh1|2|3 if you download this new dataset. Otherwise, you’ll end up with duplicated objects.
The upcoming release of Gaia Sky 3.6.8 brings significant performance improvements, focusing on memory optimization and CPU usage reduction. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at these enhancements and how they translate into smoother and faster performance.
We’ve just leveled up bookmarks in Gaia Sky! As of the latest update, location bookmarks are no longer limited to just camera position, orientation, and time. Now, they can also store the full settings file and the focus object — giving you a complete snapshot of your session. Additionally, on creation the user may choose what elements to persist as part of the bookmark.
This means that when you load a bookmark, Gaia Sky can restore not only where you were, but also how things were configured and what object you were focused on. Whether you’re setting up a custom visualization, preparing a presentation, or just exploring the cosmos, your environment can now be fully restored with a single click.
One of the items in our road map has long been the re-implementation of the speed scaling algorithm. This algorithm is a function that, given the current state of Gaia Sky, returns a number by which to scale the camera speed.
So far, we have used a function that only takes into account the distance to the focus object (focus mode), or the distance to the closest object (any other mode). This does not work very well in many situations. In this post, I explore the new developments in Gaia Sky that enable smoother interstellar trips by means of the camera speed scaling.