Today I’m releasing version 0.800b of Gaia Sky, probably the last beta version before version one, which will come in late summer with GDR1 (Gaia data release 1).

This time around we bring on loads of improvements, bug fixes and new features. Here is a comprehensive change log:

• Reimplemented star render algorithm, now all stars are shaded as points in the GPU.
• New Milky Way rendering with 40K particles and 100 nebulae.
• Three graphics quality settings, low, normal and high, which have an impact in the size of textures, the complexity of the models and the quality of the graphical effects.

The Gaia Sky software, former Gaia Sandbox, (and in particular its WebGL ports) has been chosen by ESA to be Gaia Image of the Week. The WebGL version includes a spinoff –called A Window to Gaia: The Focal Plane – which displays in real time the Tycho-2 stars that are being observed by Gaia. The WebGL ports have problems with mobile browsers and also with Safari, but they should work well with Google Chrome and Firefox (the former is significantly faster than the latter).

I have been working hard these last couple of months and today I’m proud to announce the release of the second beta version of the Gaia Sandbox, the open source, free, astronomy sandbox focused on the Gaia mission.

Today we have published the first public BETA version (v0.703b) of the Gaia Sandbox, a real-time, 3D, astronomy visualisation application that runs on Linux, Windows and MacOSX systems. Its main purpose is to serve as an outreach platform to ESA’s Gaia mission, and it is free (as in freedom and gratis). It is also open source under the LGPL, so go try it out!

Turns out the German physics educational journal Physik in unserer Zeit (Physics in our time) published a thorough review of one of my Android apps, the Particle Physics Simulator back in January 2014. One of the authors of the article, Jan-Philipp Burde, contacted me a while back to let me know that he was preparing the article and to ask some information on how the code works, which I gladly provided. Then, he kindly contacted me again when the article was published in the January 2014 issue of the journal.

For what I could understand with my still basic German, the article talks about how the app can aid in the teaching of gas dynamics, providing some hints on the configuration set-up (no gravity, elastic collisions, etc.) in order to simulate a gas. For example, it teaches how to illustrate the concept of Brownian motion, removing the gravity and creating several small-sized particles along with one or two big-sized particles.

Lately, I have been messing around with a snake game written in HTML5+js. A great deal of parameters can be modified in real time using an input form in the same page, such as the width and length of canvas, cell shape, background colour, food colour, snake colour and the speed of the game. Also, I posted the full javascript code.

If you are interested, you can check the results here.