ESO and Stellarium

I have been using the excellent Stellarium desktop planetarium software since 2004 and it just keeps improving. Stellarium not only looks beautiful but is free, cross-platform, and open source. I recently heard a rumour that it may be adapted for professional astronomers. I hadn't been able to confirm that rumour but I notice that this was mentioned on the Sourceforge forums back in May by a different source. It would appear that project founder, Fabien Chereau, has been hired by ESO (European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere) to transform Stellarium into a nice graphical tool that could be used by professional astronomers to analyse real data from ESO's telescopes. Sounds good. I guess this puts us some way towards the Hollywood view of professional astronomers using gee-whizz graphical interfaces to analyse their data rather than the rather clunky (but accurate) software of reality.

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Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Friday 02nd Nov 2007 (18:28 BST) | Add a comment | Permalink

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