Stellarium for Java, alpha
A few years ago, I started prototyping UFO@home, a visual testimony tool inspired by works of Roger Shepard, Richard Haines and motivated by Pierre Lagrange with the aim of improving UFO reporting. As I explained in another post, the benefit of such a tool was also, to me, to allow simulating known phenomena hypothesis (astronomical, balloons, meteors, planes, birds…) in order to validate or exclude them, along with agreement of the witness. Once the prototype done, I needed to produce the most realistic sky rendering as possible. This required re-writing (then, later, extend with ufology features) the state-of-the-art planetarium software, known as Stellarium. Then Stellarium for Java (S4J) was born.
This post was initially written in french, on February 16th, 2008
This is done now as a first version is available through the Java Web Start system (to install before, which allows to start a Java application that can be downloaded from the Internet) on SourceForge or Java.net. This version is not a final one yet nor without any bugs, but it is usable at least.
Furthermore, it has been selected for the JavaOne event, where I will showcase it next May with my co-developer.
So you are welcome to test this first version and report any feedback or issues you may encounter, so that we will be able to ship a final version with reasonable quality standards.
Once this “iso” version finished and validated, notably through your feedback, mastering the Java source code will allow to add ufology-specific features in a dedicated and separate software, which will be the first realistic version of UFO@home.