Nightshade opensource astronomy project looking for volunteers

[bunty]

Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc. which develops tools for astronomy education has launched Nightshade astronomy simulation and visualization software specifically tailored to digital planetarium and educator use. It creates a realistic simulation of the sky when and where the user chooses. Nightshade renders over 100,000 stars in stunning realism and in situ images of deep sky objects of note, including many Hubble Space Telescope images. Users can explore the solar system from many perspectives: visiting far-off moons, zooming in on planetary features, or tracing orbits and trails, for example. Constellations from many different cultures are included, and the software is internationalized to support more than 40 different languages. The software is highly customizable for differing preferences and applications.

Nightshade project is looking for help and feedback of users and software developers particularly a developer to build a Mac OS X package .Volunteers are needed for translating, testing, suggesting features, providing more sky culture information, designing culture-appropriate constellation art, creating scripts and documentation .

Nightshade is available for Linux, Windows, and (eventually) Mac OS X. It is backward compatible with scripts for Stellarium (http://stellarium.org/)0.8.2 and earlier, using the StratoScript? language developed and maintained by Digitalis (http://www.digitaliseducation.com/).

Please visit: http://NightshadeSoftware.org (http://NightshadeSoftware.org)for all details.