Nightshade For Linux

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, but tailored for 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 StratoScriptTM language developed and maintained by Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc.

Nightshade is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and other platforms.

The Nightshade codebase is currently used as the simulation software on literally hundreds of Digitarium digital planetarium systems around the world. We would like to see more planetarium educators and vendors adopt Nightshade as their simulator of choice.

Digitalis originally sponsored planetarium specific features in Stellarium such as fisheye projection mode, fixed bugs, and added many new features such as the StratoScript scripting engine, lunar eclipse simulation, etc.

Unfortunately Stellarium development focus shifted almost exclusively to desktop use, with large changes to implement a new graphical interface. In the process the simulation realism suffered and planetarium specific features were simply dropped without discussion.

It became very apparent that the two different uses were not coexisting equally, and the decision was made to release Nightshade and build a community around this project that cares primarily about planetarium and educator usage.

Even if you can't write software, we can still use your help with translations, sky culture data, testing, feature suggestions, landscapes, documentation, useful scripts, and bug reports.

While Digitalis manages the development of Nightshade, we are explicitly vendor neutral and will accept any patches that move the project forward.

Together we can accomplish so much more than any of us can alone.