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 and Windows, although other platforms such as Mac OS X may be supported in the future.

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://NightshadeSotware.org.