Nightshade Professional

The main core of a digital planetarium

Software is the main core of any digital system. In planetarium systems, whether we consider optical planetarium or digital planetariums, it is responsible for lot of important functions such as movement controls, system settings, and so on.

As for digital planetariums, the software plays a central role because all the "business logic", the intelligence, of the digital system is contained in it.

We can certainly talk about the size of the stellar database or multimedia content, but these are not the most important features that we have to look for when we consider a digital planetarium. There are two main features that digital planetarium software should present:

it should be calibrated on the capabilities of projection optics and,
it must have a Graphical User Interface that is very usable, in other words very easy to use.

Nightshade Astronomy Simulator

The Digitarium digital planetarium system produced by Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc., employes the new Nightshade Astronomy Simulator planetarium software, specifically designed by Digitalis to obtain the best effects and reliability inside the dome.

Up to now Nightshade Professional, the advanced version included into every Digitalis Digitarium main unit, is the best and most powerful planetarium software available at this price.

This software is constantly updated and improved, all the updates can be downloaded free of charge from the Digitalis website simply connecting the planetarium to a high speed internet line. Its potentialities are really amazing.

What is it?

Nightshade Astronomy Simulation is free, open source astronomy simulation and visualization software for teaching and exploring astronomy, Earth science, and related topics. Nightshade is a fork of 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 StratoScript language developed and maintained by Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc.

It is available for different platform, such as Linux, Windows, Mac OSX, and others.

For his Digitarium planetarium systems, Digitalis employs an advanced version of the opensource edition, Nightshade Professional. This improved version contains lot of new features and improvements such as image distortion correction routines for best performance with Digitalis fish-eye lenses.

Nightshade Professional

Digitalis uses on its own planetarium the Professional version that includes multimedia capabilities and improved astronomical capabilities. Digitalis developers are hard at work on Nightshade Professional, which is a major milestone for the project.

This improved versio over the opensource edition has the following additional features:

A terrain engine for realistic and detailed terrain imagery and topographic data for select planets such as the Earth.
Improved atmosphere rendering as in this sunset over the ocean.
Very high resolution maps for planets and their moons.
The ability to view 3d models of irregular bodies such as asteroids or spacecraft, or even user loaded models such as chemical compounds.
Built-in databases updated nightly for comets, asteroids, exo-planets, and artificial satellites.
Contains more than 11.000.000 stars, from the brightest to those over the 13.5th magnitude, they can be selected by the user and appear as soon as you zoom deep in the universe.
Hundreds of Gigabytes of extended data sets not available on the standard version for use in a planetarium. These data sets will cover planet terrain (imagery and topography) and galaxies (positions, orientation, imagery for type).

With the addition of these features, Nightshade Professional will come close to matching proprietary planetarium software which is either only bundled with proprietary hardware or cost literally tens of thousands of dollars up front for a license and many thousands of dollars a year for (limited!) support and upgrades.

Other features

Easy to use
Keystrokes are mostly compatible with Stellarium
Highly configurable
Unmatched starfield realism and configurability
Supports 40+ languages, including right-to-left and cursive languages like Arabic
Support for daylight savings and all world timezones (on Linux operating systems only)
Show moon or other body orbit visualizations, 3D depth buffered for realism
Explore a planet from above
Zoom to a location below the zenith for easier viewing in a dome
Support for distortion correction when the projector must be placed off-center
Load solar system objects (such as natural or artificial satellites, asteroids, comets, etc.) from a script
Play videos from a script (vendor specific)
Integration with media display/distortion correction software (vendor specific)
Lens distortion correction built in (vendor specific)