Aciqra: Milestone 5 Released

Posted August 26, 2011 by User 1

It has been just ten days since the completion of Milestone 4 but those days have been among the most productive in the history of the project. The three objectives for Milestone 5 were completed in that time as were many other improvements allowing the milestone, originally scheduled for mid-September, to be released today, a full three weeks ahead of schedule.

Despite the short period of development, there are plenty of changes since Milestone 4:
- Show illumination percentage under object information
- Support for the Tycho-2 star catalog
- Option for solar system objects to [not] look like stars when zoomed out
- Phases of the Sun, Moon and planets
- Transition from star-like glow to disk for solar system objects
- Solar system objects draw with correct z-index
- Coordinate grids (equatorial and horizontal) with labels

With the Tycho-2 catalog (of 2.5 million stars) is now supported and being the default catalog, the installer package is now almost 57 MB in size. As not everyone has a fast internet connection, a smaller alternative is now being offered: the Bright Star Edition. Officially the Aciqra 2 Milestone 5 (Bright Star Edition), the BSE skips Tycho-2 in favor of the much smaller Bright Star Catalog (with 9000 stars) which is enough for most users and is much smaller at just 2.55 MB.

As always, downloads are available from the downloads archive: http://www.caglow.com/dlarchive/1

Source code is available in Subversion. Milestone 5 is revision 76 which may be downloaded here: http://aciqra.svn.sf.net/viewvc/aciqra/trunk/?view=tar&pathrev=76

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