Heroes of the World!

Today when I entered the office I found a welcome present in my mail folder that made my day: David Roberts had sent me a patch to put our Marble Earth directly into the spotlight of our G2V Main-Sequence Star (also known as "sun" among non-astronomers). That's totally awesome because this feature will allow kde-edu users to visualize things like seasons. This feature always has been on my personal TODO but I haven't been brave enough yet to start work on it myself because it deals with the (non-trivial) texture mapping code. So I'm thrilled to see that someone else has started to work on this!

Currently the code David Roberts has sent me works quite well already but still needs some fixes and larger speed optimizations. But that doesn't keep me from posting screenshots already:

On another topic Claudiu Covaci has used the Marble Widget to create a small application for a student project at the university. It shows the orbits of some theoretical (GPS) satellite orbits around the earth. He does it by creating a Google Earth KML file from the orbital elements and by feeding it to the Marble Widget. He has also sent me a patch that removed the last few issues with little additional code required. As a result I also post screenshots of the satellite-KML in Google Earth and Marble. As you can see Google Earth fails to display the possible satellite positions for the hemisphere that is targeted away from the observer:

I'd like to thank all the people that have sent me patches and bug reports (like the one I received from Toti today) for Marble recently.

In the meantime Inge and me are working on the next bug fix release Marble 0.5.1.