The Digitalis Stellarium software is a great way to view the stars from the comfort of your desktop, and was used widely by planetariums worldwide to project the solar system and view astronomical features as well. However, the software has been lacking in recent versions so Digitalis has ‘forked’ the project into a new piece of software: Nightshade.
Digitalis originally sponsored planetarium specific features in Stellarium such as fisheye projection mode, fixed bugs, and added many new features such as the StratoScript scripting engine, lunar eclipse simulation, etc.
Unfortunately Stellarium development focus shifted almost exclusively to desktop use, with large changes to implement a new graphical interface. In the process the simulation realism suffered and planetarium specific features were simply dropped without discussion.
It became very apparent that the two different uses were not coexisting equally, and the decision was made to release Nightshade and build a community around this project that cares primarily about planetarium and educator usage.
Nightshade is available for Linux and Windows, and eventually for Mac OSX as well, and is completely backwards compatible with Stellarium 0.8.2 scripts.
