slackbuilds_ponce/academic/gaiasky/README

Gaia Sky is a real-time, 3D, astronomy visualisation software free 
and open source that provides a number of features that allows people 
to observe and study the space in Virtual Reality. This slackbuild 
install the prebuilt package released for Ubuntu.

Gaia Sky is developed in the framework of ESA's Gaia mission to chart 
about 1 billion stars of our Galaxy in the Gaia group of the 
Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ZAH, Universität Heidelberg). 

Hardware requirements: CPU 4 core or higher, GPU with 1 GB RAM with 
support for OpenGL (at least 3.2) and GLSL 3.3, memory with 2-6 GB RAM 
depending on catalog, and at least 1 GB of free disk space depending 
on datasets.

*** WARNING ***
1. Datasets
Gaia Sky requires pre-packed datasets (Gaia eDR3, NBG, SDSS, OCDR2, 
ecc.) provided by the project, but can be used with other datasets in 
VOTable, FITS, CSV and other formats (STIL).
When Gaia Sky starts for the first time, the application searches the 
default dataset in ~/.local/share/gaiasky/data. If any dataset is not 
found, Gaia Sky launches the Download Manager, a graphic interface 
that allows to users to download the default dataset required. The 
repository provides also other optional datasets which improve the 
features of Gaia Sky (some datasets have very large size). For further 
information, please read the README.SBo file.

2. How to start Gaia Sky
A Desktop entry which launches the GUI is provided with the 
installation (in Education > Science), but Gaia Sky can be started by 
command-line if you want apply some flags. About this mode please read 
the README.SBo file.

3. Virtual Reality
The VR rendering is still in alpha mode: it is uncomplete and may 
cause issues depending on the configuration.