Gaia Sky is a real-time, 3D, astronomy visualisation software free
and open source that provides a number of features that allows people
to observe and study the space in Virtual Reality. This slackbuild
install the prebuilt package released for Ubuntu.
Gaia Sky is developed in the framework of ESA's Gaia mission to chart
about 1 billion stars of our Galaxy in the Gaia group of the
Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ZAH, Universität Heidelberg).
Hardware requirements: CPU 4 core or higher, GPU with 1 GB RAM with
support for OpenGL (at least 3.2) and GLSL 3.3, memory with 2-6 GB RAM
depending on catalog, and at least 1 GB of free disk space depending
on datasets.
*** WARNING ***
1. Datasets
Gaia Sky requires pre-packed datasets (Gaia eDR3, NBG, SDSS, OCDR2,
ecc.) provided by the project, but can be used with other datasets in
VOTable, FITS, CSV and other formats (STIL).
When Gaia Sky starts for the first time, the application searches the
default dataset in ~/.local/share/gaiasky/data. If any dataset is not
found, Gaia Sky launches the Download Manager, a graphic interface
that allows to users to download the default dataset required. The
repository provides also other optional datasets which improve the
features of Gaia Sky (some datasets have very large size). For further
information, please read the README.SBo file.
2. How to start Gaia Sky
A Desktop entry which launches the GUI is provided with the
installation (in Education > Science), but Gaia Sky can be started by
command-line if you want apply some flags. About this mode please read
the README.SBo file.
3. Virtual Reality
The VR rendering is still in alpha mode: it is uncomplete and may
cause issues depending on the configuration.
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