About

NightSky2 is a small hobby project of mine that I got the inspiration to create when I realized that the, in my opinion, singularly best and most pedagogical resource for learning the absolute basics in recognizing constellations had disappeared off the net.

This, now gone, resource resided on http://quietbay.net/Science/astronomy/nightsky/ and the name of this project comes from that last part of the original site's URL: NightSky (version 2).

The goal with this project is simply to attempt the creation of a learning resources, which will hopefully be as accessible to beginners as the original was.

Additionally, in order to prevent NightSky2 from sharing the fate of its predecessor, NightSky2 is also available for download, so that you might set it up yourself, in case this site goes down for whatever reason.

Which brings us to ...

Licensing

I have tried my very best to sort out what licenses come into play in this project, considering the original licenses which the content I use is published under.

Regarding the original Nightsky, the site is gone, and the few scraps left of it which can be found through extensive searches on archive.org makes no mention of a license. This means that it is Copyrighted to the author and usage of his/her material could be sketchy at best.

With that said, the only thing re-used from the original site are the structure of the guide and the knowledge it contained, and also some phrases from the start-page, because I found them to beautiful in sentiment to let pass into oblivion.

As to the imagery found in NightSky2, they all come from the excellent free software Stellarium.

Even here, the licensing issue is kind of muddy, the relevant FAQ-question sadly doesn't contribute with much clarity either. In the end it does lead here, which I interpret that content derived from Stellarium is allowed to be used at least for non-commercial purposes, but that one should give attribution in the following way:

                4.7 The fullsky milky way panorama is created by Axel Mellinger,
                University of Potsdam, Germany. Further information and more pictures
                available from http://home.arcor-online.de/axel.mellinger/ 
                License: permission given to "Modify and redistribute this image if proper credit
                to the original image is given."
                4.13 Constellation art, GUI buttons, logo created by Johan Meuris
                (Jomejome) (jomejome at users.sourceforge.net) http://users.pandora.be/jomejom/
                License: released under the Free Art License (http://artlibre.org/licence.php/lalgb.html)

As NightSky2 aims to be an attempt at creating more of a educational resource, than it attempts to be art, the Free Art License seems like the wrong tool for the job.

From what I gather about the Free Art License one is allowed to switch it to another license, as long as they are compatible.

From this page I gather that a Creative Commons By-SA license (Attribution, Share Alike) should be compatible.

The Free Art License seem to make provisions to allow users to make for-profit derivatives, so a BY-NC-SA license should, strictly speaking, not be compatible, even though something in the back of my head tells me that the authors of Stellarium don't wish commercial exploitation of their artwork.

To anyone wanting to commercialize NightSky2: I am fine with that, but please check with the original creators of the artwork before using it in a commercial setting, this is for your own good.

Creative Commons License
NightSky2 by Patrik Willard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Credits / Thanks

Nightsky

My thanks go to the creator of the original site, without which this project would never have existed. His/her generosity in spreading knowledge, through a superbly pedagogical interface drove me to create this project in its memory.

Whoever you are, whatever you do nowadays, thank you.

Stellarium

My thanks are also extended to all the cool people who have helped to make Stellarium into the kick-ass application that it is.

Without Stellarium, there would not have been a NightSky2

Jenny

You are my inspiration, and without your presence in my life, when things got rough, NightSky2 would have had to pay the price.

So this one is for you. Thank you.

Download

NightSky2 is available for download either as a zip-file, or as a tarball.

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