Toni Sagristà Sellés - Personal site & portfolio

Astronomy Picture of the Day features Gaia Sky

tonisagrista — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 06:48:27 +0000

Today, 26 September 2016, the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) features a video we have prepared with Gaia Sky at the ARI/Uni Heidelberg. The video itself shows a flight from outside of our Milky Way galaxy to the Sun and then a travel through the Solar System towards the vicinity of the Earth, displaying in this journey a little over 600.000 stars from the TGAS part of Gaia Data Release 1.

The video caption wanders a bit off topic, for it mentions neither Gaia DR1 nor TGAS, the main points of the video. Anyway, it is nice to have a video featured in APOD.

Gaia videos

tonisagrista — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 08:38:46 +0000

With Gaia Data Release 1 in mind, we have prepared a few videos with flights through the TGAS catalog and generally showcasing the Gaia Sky.

Check out the playlist:

First version of Gaia Sky released in conjunction with Gaia DR1

tonisagrista — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 08:34:01 +0000

Last September 14 the first Gaia catalog, Gaia Data Release 1, was made public. To celebrate the occasion, we also released version 1.0.0 of our virtual Universe software, Gaia Sky. This time around, the software comes with big improvements and lots of new features, the most prominent of which is the addition of the TGAS catalog, a part of Gaia DR1 which contains 3D positions for approximately 2 million objects. Check out the release trailer.

Here is the changelog. As always, for a full list of changes see here.

TGAS is now the default catalog. HYG can still be selected from the data tab in the config dialog
We can now also lock the orientation of the camera to that of the focus
Added new options to control star appearance (point size, minimum opacity, etc.)
Added sliders to control draw distance in Level-of-detail catalogues such as TGAS.
Added new Planetarium mode
Added new red-cyan anaglyphic 3D mode
Added distortion in VR-headset 3D mode
Lots of bug fixes and adjustments

You can download the Linux (deb, rpm, installer, aur), Windows (32 and 64 bit version) or MacOS X versions here.

Gaia Sky hits version 0.800b

tonisagrista — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 12:36:14 +0000

Today I'm releasing version 0.800b of the 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. Check the comprehensive change log out:

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.
New embedded music player in the Gaia Sky interface to play your favourite songs when Gaiaing!
Improved mouse interactions.
Stereoscopic mode effects have been fixed and now work properly in 3D.
Improved scripting system.
New volumetric light rendering system.
Time pace substituted by time warp, which sets the time speed as a function of real time.
Added new UI themes. Now HiDPI screens (retina) are supported.
Migrated most GUI elements to internal system. Swing is now only used for preferences.
FOV mode fixed with correct field of view angles. This corrects stars taking only ~3.2 secs to cross a CCD.
Implemented interface to Gaia archive (now using mockup data), Simbad and Wikipedia.
Implemented responsive positioning giving RA/DEC or Lat/Lon of mouse position.
Lots of bug fixes and other minor improvements.
As usual, check the full changelog for more detailed info.

You can get the new version for Linux, Windows and OS X in the official Gaia Sky page.

The Gaia Sky is Gaia Image of the Week

tonisagrista — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 06:46:13 +0000

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).

Here is the video which showcases the web applications:

Lots of new exciting stuff in Gaia Sandbox 0.704b

tonisagrista — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 17:22:57 +0000

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.

It comes with lots of bug fixes, features and improvements. But do not believe me, check out the following list of new stuff for yourself:

Lots of bug fixes.
Internationalised (EN, DE, ES, CA).
Interface overhaul.
New theme - Dark-big.
Stereoscopic mode.
Gamepad support.
New JSON data format.
New dwarf planets/asteroids.
STIL integration (VOTable, csv, FITS, etc.).
Camera speed limits.
Camera path recording and playing.
HDR atmospheric scattering.

Check the full list of changes since the last version in GitHub.

So, what are you waiting for? Go try it out, and if you find bugs or have suggestions, do not hesitate to report!

Released the first beta version of the Gaia Sandbox!

tonisagrista — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 10:21:23 +0000

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!

The Gaia Sandbox is a real time simulation of Gaia, the Solar System and the Galaxy with advanced graphics and more than 100.000 stars to observe and navigate through. Here are some of its main features:

Real time 3D simulation of the Solar System and the Galaxy.
Intuitive controls to steer the camera with ease.
Real Gaia orbit and attitude.
Real time Gaia Field of View projections.
Real time Gaia observation computation.
Scriptable with python.
Output each frame as an image with any resolution to compose videos.
Postprocessing effects: Lens flare, bloom.
Atmospheric scattering models.
Dynamic hi-res texturing.
Per-pixel lighting.
Realistic time simulation.
Works on Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

Download the application from its home page, where you can also get more information on it:
Gaia Sandbox home page

Physik in unserer Zeit reviews the Particle Physics Simulator

tonisagrista — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 11:54:32 +0000

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.

If you are interested, you can get that article for free here: Link to article. Just click on Get PDF in the ARTICLE TOOLS menu on the right.

Messing around with HTML5

tonisagrista — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 17:28:18 +0000

Hi there! 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.

Some photos of Nepal

tonisagrista — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 08:10:22 +0000

Today I'd like to drop some photos of my recent holidays to Nepal here. All of these were taken using a Canon 40D with the Canon 28-105 USM II f3.5-4.5. I decided to leave my other two lenses home (the wide angle lens Sigma 10-20 1:4-5.6 EX DC HSM and the standard Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 Mk II) because of the philosophy of the travel. We were mostly a backpacker group and we'd be moving around quite a lot, trekking the Himalayas and going to the jungle, so I figured the extra weight wasn't worth it. Looking backwards, I regret not taking the wide angle lens, for some of the landscapes we could behold were truly amazing.

Also, I took a good bunch of pictures using my phone, the LG Nexus 4, you'll find some in the Flickr set too.

Nepal 2013 photo gallery

Flickr photos from the album Nepal 2013 by Toni Sagristà Sellés

33 out of 33 on Flickr