Stellarium

Web Page: http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Google_Summer_of_Code_2012

Mailing List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stellarium-pubdevel

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.  It can be used to show satellites in their orbits, and time laps eclipses.

It is being used no only on the desktop, but in planetariums to run projectors.It allows for historic views of the skies, and supports 14 different sky cultures, and 85 different languages.

Just set your coordinates and go.

Projects

• Advanced search/filtering objects by characteristics, list views and keybindings For now there is no tool for viewing objects with particular characteristics or types (for example all comets) inside Stellarium. My goal is to introduce a convenient interface for viewing and filtrating celestial objects, and advanced search not only by name or location, but by object's type and characteristics. Also I want to make the possibility to look through lists of most frequently used objects (planets, satellites, etc), and select by clicking. Furthermore, almost all keybindings are in use for now. I want to introduce multi-key keybindings in emacs/vim style.
• OpenGL code refactor Stellarium OpenGL code is all over the place and not very maintainable. The goal of this project is to isolate the OpenGL code into a separate subsystem that will be usable through a backend-independent API, so in future, backends for other OpenGL versions or even non-OpenGL backends could be created.
• Realistic Comet Rendering Stellarium users should be able to easily view comets rendered according to their actual appearance: comas with directed tails, of the correct color and length.
• Solar system shadows This project aims to add shadows to all solar system bodies that can receive shadows.