Latest blog posts, news, features, and dev stories
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It’s been a month now, and unfortunately, our main download server is still offline. We know this is quite frustrating for users, as it is for us too.
For those just catching up: our server, which holds all the Gaia Sky installers, data packs, and docs, is hosted behind a Heidelberg University domain. About a month ago, the university’s IT center detected a widespread security incident and took major preventative action, which included taking our server (and many others) offline.
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We regret to inform our users that our server, hosting Gaia Sky packages, datasets, and documentation, is currently inaccessible from external networks. This is due to precautionary measures taken by the University Computing Center (URZ) at the University of Heidelberg.
For more details on these measures, please refer to the official announcement from the URZ: Precautionary Measures by URZ.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated as the situation evolves.
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This post introduces an experimental galaxy generation system currently in development, which generates and visualizes galaxies in real time. By leveraging multiple channels, such as stars, gas, dust, H II regions, and the galactic bulge, the system generates diverse galaxy types, each with distinct structural features.
Below is a preview of this system’s capabilities, showcasing the generated galaxies through a series of images. This is an early look at the technology and a demonstration of how we’re using the power of GPU-based compute shaders to create somewhat realistic galaxies very rapidly. Keep in mind that this is still a work in progress, with many improvements and additional features planned before release.
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Last Saturday, at the 16. Koblenzer Nacht der Technik, we had the opportunity to present Gaia Sky VR to a large and enthusiastic audience. With big queues forming and a constant stream of people eager to try the experience, we were presented with a perfect, real-world test lab. We learned a good amount by watching so many first-time users interact with the cosmos in VR. One lesson became crystal clear: the standard control scheme, while powerful for experienced users, can be a source of confusion during fast-paced public demos.
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Today we publish Gaia Sky 3.7.0. The main point of this release is to fix a show-stopping bug that occurs with the latest version of macOS, code-named Tahoe. On macOS Tahoe, Gaia Sky 3.6.11 crashes at startup due to the operating system hardware information library (oshi) returning nothing when asked for the operating system code name. This has been fixed in 3.7.0. But the fun does not end here, as 3.7.0 is cut from the bleeding edge development branch, so it includes all sorts of new features, QoL improvements, and additional fixes. Read on for more.
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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.
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Exactly a week after the release of 3.6.10, we release Gaia Sky 3.6.11. This is a small-ish release that contains a few new API calls and some important bug fixes. Keep reading for the list of changes.
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Today we are happy to announce the release of Gaia Sky 3.6.10. This is a release that improves on 3.6.9 by bringing a handful of minor improvements and quality-of-life updates, and a lot of bug fixes. Additionally, it enables new versions of the base data and the high resolution textures packs, and a new virtual texture dataset based on Sentinel-2 data.
Here is a screenshot with that Sentinel-2 dataset, which goes down to a resolution of 10 meters/pixel:
You can get this dataset in Gaia Sky 3.6.10. The dataset key is vt-earth-diffuse-sentinel. See a video in BlueSky showcasing the virtual texture sentinel dataset.