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Contains the full Hipparcos database of 118 218 stars - plus an optional database of 2 million more stars - with true 3D-positions! Several star rendering modes: From simple points to Saturated Gauss bells with diffraction crosses. Visible extent when you get close to a star. Optional visual effects such as lens flares, camera burn-out, and diffraction cross'. Just double-click on a star to travel to it! |
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View a large selection of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae, compiled from a variety of catalogues. NB: With the exception of a few nearby objects (e.g. the Orion nebula), Galaxies, nebulae and clusters are not stored in 3D in the database, which means that you can only view them 'far away'. |
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 Visit all of the planets and the major satellites of our solar system. The program contains highly detailed planet surface maps, as well as special maps for specular high lights, bumpiness, and cloud layers. |
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Includes a comprehensive database of common names for stars, constellations, galaxies, nebulae and planet surface features (all are of course searcheable!). You can right click on any object to view more extensive catalogue information on it, including educative notes for some selected objects (it also is possible to add your own notes with a little work...). |
The 'Object finder' wizard, pictured below.
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  Optionally use 'anaglyph 3D-glasses' for stereo 3D - both 'normal' and 'colour' anaglyphs are supported (above is one a 'red-cyan' color anaglyph). |
More features:
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Includes several educational as well as entertaining and beautiful tutorials. |
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Optional relativistic aberration and Doppler-shift effects - travel in a true Einsteinean universe rather than in Newtonian fashion. |
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Use controllers (mice, keyboard, joysticks c) for steering your star-ship - fully configurable controls! |
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Scripting engine and StarLua extension language - with a little work it's possible to create your own demonstrations and presentations just like the included tutorials. With a litte more work you can make very advanced extension to the program! |
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A scientifically accurate planetarium - made by an astronomer and a software engineer - both with a background in physics! |
| Highly realistic rendering is possible - Compare with a real photograph. |
| More screen-shots! |
Support for the latest hardware:
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StarStrider can run quite well on a wide range of hardware.
But if you have modern hardware then it will take advantage of it in order to improve both frame rates and rendering quality. E.g.: |
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Support for Pixel & Vertex Shader 2.0 (or later): If your 3D-hardware supports this, then the otherwise "multi-pass rendering" of planets and of saturated stars are replaced with much faster single pass "shader programs" that are not only faster, but also adds per-pixel lighting, bump-mapping support, and improved rendering quality through the use of floating point calculations. |
| Our pixel shader for rendering Earth comes very close to the maximum instruction limit for the Pixel Shader 2.0 specification. It calculates per-pixel lighting with ambient light, two directional lights (the Moon and the Sun!), a specular light map (sparkling reflections in the oceans!), physically correct bump mapping (true rotation of the surface normal based on a height map for shadowed and sunlit mountain sides), a separate city light map for the night side, ray-traced cloud shadows, a moving cloud layer, and finally atmospheric haze effects. This in a single rendering pass - replacing up to seven rendering passes necessary on older hardware! |
| Support for dual-core or Hyper-threading systems: When enabled, data-base retrieval and projection of starswill run in parallel with other tasks. |
| Object databases comes in a highly optimized format that works equally well however you move around in space. |