Gaia Sky

An open source 3D universe simulator for desktop and VR with support for more than a billion objects

Gaia Sky is a real-time 3D Universe application that runs on Linux, Windows and macOS. It is developed within the framework of ESA's Gaia mission to chart more than 1 billion stars.

A part of Gaia Sky is described in the paper Gaia Sky: Navigating the Gaia Catalog.

To get the latest up-to-date and most complete information,

• Visit our home page
• Read the official documentation
• Submit a bug or a feature request
• Follow development news at #GaiaSky@mastodon

This file contains the following sections:

1. Installation instructions and requirements
2. Pre-built packages
3. Running from source
4. Gaia Sky VR
5. Documentation and help
6. Copyright and licensing information
7. Contact information
8. Contributing
9. Credits and acknowledgements

1. Installation instructions and requirements

1.1. Requirements

Component	Minimum requirement
Operating system	Linux / Windows 7+ / macOS, x86-64 (ARM CPUs are unsupported)
CPU	Intel Core i5 3rd Generation. 4+ cores recommended
GPU	Support for OpenGL 3.3 (4.x recommended), 1 GB VRAM
Memory	2-6 GB RAM (depends on loaded datasets)
Hard drive	1 GB of free disk space (depends on downloaded datasets)

2. Pre-built packages

This is the Gaia Sky source repository. We recommend using the pre-built packages for the different Operating Systems in case you want a stable and hassle-free experience. We offer pre-built packages for Linux, macOS or Windows here.

3. Development branch

In order to compile and run Gaia Sky using the master branch sources, you need the following installed in your system:

• JDK, latest LTS version recommended
• git

First, clone the Gaia Sky repository:

git clone https://codeberg.org/gaiasky/gaiasky.git

Then, run Gaia Sky (Linux, macOS) with the provided script:

cd gaiasky
./gaiasky

On Windows, open PowerShell, make sure your $JAVA_HOME environment variable points to a valid JDK installation, and run:

.\gradlew.bat core:run

Et voilà! The bleeding edge Gaia Sky is running in your machine.

3.1 CLI arguments

Run gaiasky -h or man gaiasky to find out about how to launch Gaia Sky and what arguments are accepted.

If running directly with gradle, you can add arguments using the gradle --args flag, like this:

gradlew core:run --args='-h'

3.2 Getting the data

As of version 2.1.0, Gaia Sky offers an integrated way to download and manage all datasets and catalogs from within the application. The dataset manager, accessible from the welcome screen, enables browsing and downloading available datasets, and enabling and disabling already installed/downloaded datasets.

You can also download the datasets manually here. Once downloaded, the datasets, which usually come in .tar.gz packages, can be extracted directly in the Gaia Sky data directory.

4. Gaia Sky VR

Gaia Sky supports rendering to a VR headset using the OpenXR API. This mode is currently in beta stage, meaning that it works rather well, but you may encounter hiccups here and there.

Run Gaia Sky in VR using the -vr flag from the CLI, or, on Windows, run the gaiaskyvr.exe file.

gaiasky -vr

More information on how to make the VR version work properly in the VR.md file.

5. Documentation and help

The most up-to-date documentation of Gaia Sky is always hosted at gaia.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/gaiasky/docs. The documentation source repository is hosted here.

6. Copyright and licensing information

This software is published and distributed under the MPL 2.0 (Mozilla Public License 2.0). You can find the full license text here or visiting opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0.

7. Contact information

The main webpage of the project is zah.uni-heidelberg.de/gaia/outreach/gaiasky. There you can find the latest versions and the latest information on Gaia Sky.

8. Contributing

Find information about contributing translations, code or ideas in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

9. Acknowledgements

The latest acknowledgements are always in the ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md file.