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\chapter*{Foreword for Stellarium 26.1}
\label{ch:Foreword}

Welcome to the latest edition of this software. 

Over its project history of over 25 years, Stellarium has grown better every year as an easy to use simulator that shows on screen what you would see if the 
night sky outside was void from clouds but else filled with the quietly shining stars which have inspired humans around the globe from time immemorial with their unbreakable solemnity.
The past decades have however challenged this ``unbreakable'' state. 
Light pollution from excessive artificial light at night has diminished the number of stars and especially visibility of the Milky Way for large parts of the population, and it is getting worse every year.  
And another technical development acts as solemnity breaker.  The first artificial satellites were greeted as signs of technical progress, and nobody would doubt that 
telecommunication, navigation, weather observation,  or general earth observation and other remote sensing  satellites are useful. 
The International Space Station, once established as a bright beacon of international collaboration for the benefit of humankind, is still always a spectacle to observe. 
Unfortunately it seems to be already a monument of a better past. 

Observing the once-solemn starry skies nowadays appears to be permanently disturbed by some moving dot of light, or even several dots, crossing the field of view. 
Whenever I ask Stellarium's Satellites plugin for identification, almost every time it is a member of always the same ``satellite constellation'' 
which is still permanently growing and --- simply has taken the joy out of one-shot astrophotography.  Yes, ``just make a hundred exposures and let the AI remove the criss-cross scratches while stacking''. 
Did I then experience this artificially restored view into the great solemn awe-inspiring infinity? Is it still ``my photo'' then? 
How would I stack wide-angle photos including a foreground landscape without evil tricks? 
And generally, it's not really about pretty pictures. Scientific astronomy is highly concerned, especially about newly announced projects like mirrors in space
illuminating the ground where nature wanted to give darkness and allow recreation, or data centers in space where they just don't belong. 
(The envisioned benefit of free radiative cooling is inefficient and needs large radiators -- how does a million of moving dots in permanent sunlight sound to your observing plan?) 
All this is connected with a spectrum of environmental problems you can surely find discussed elsewhere. 
It does not help to look away. Also climate change is happening despite irresponsible world leaders ignoring it. 

Back to the wonders of the night sky and how to enjoy them while we still can.
When you take a laptop under the skies, battery life is often a concern. The latest ARM based processors allow much longer battery life than previous CPU gemerations.  
Thanks to a laptop donation from Microsoft we now could finalize our adoption of the Windows for Arm64 platform. Especially telescope support should now work stable together with the ASCOM7 platform. 
You may be able to work with a lighter battery pack and less cables now. A little caveat: currently the build pipelines available to us do not provide the latest Qt versions, so the Arm64 build lacks support for 
the internal webbrowser of the OnlineQueries plugin (section \ref{sec:plugins:OnlineQueries}) and also speech output (section~\ref{sec:gui:configuration:speech}). We hope this issue will go away in the next months.

On the desktop, Stellarium has become the de-facto most relevant simulation environment for cultural astronomy, 
be it archaeoastronomical simulation of old standing stone rows under simulated skies of yesteryear, 
or explaining the constellations and how they can be used in the lives of the many cultures living on our planet. 


After a year with many changes: Star catalog, skyculture file format, mosaic camera, restored ASCOM telescope support, speech output, \ldots,
this first version in 2026 is mostly about consolidating. Speech output is more complete and should have become more translator friendly, but surely is a challenge for our translation teams. 
We hope speech output in your language and your operating system is becoming usable, but there are factors which we surely have missed. If you know something better, please fix it and tell us.


The new skyculture file format looks at least almost finished, closing the deficiencies of the old system that we and some of you had identified in the last years. 
Stellarium can now display multiple linguistic variants of constellation and star labels, can show ``single star constellations'' and ``dark constellations'' 
formed by dust clouds in the Milky Way, can properly identify Morning and Evening star, and for those cultures where it is relevant, 
illustrate the zodiac and lunar stations or lunar mansions in various culture-dependent versions, and some more. 

The creation of new skycultures is supported by a new plugin created by a student team around our skyculture researcher Susanne M. Hoffmann, 
the Sky Culture Maker (SCM) described in section~\ref{sec:plugins:SCM}, which guides you through the process in wizard style. 
Authors can now define skyculture regions as polygons on a map. 
Moritz Rätz finalized the plugin and also developed a new map-based skyculture selection interface that sorts skycultures by geographic regions.
(We aim at supplying the map polygons for the existing skycultures over the next few releases.) 
All details of the new format can be found in chapter~\ref{ch:SkyCultures}. 

The advanced format for sky cultures however poses a new challenge around font display. So far we don't see need for installation of additional fonts, 
but some platforms (esp. Windows) have to get ``nudged'' somewhat to show the more exotic characters. 
Please report errors when you see boxes instead of character glyphs.
The ``Gravity Labels'' which are useful in planetarium domes do not work well for Arab and certain Asiatic fonts. 
While we can see that, we have no easy fix in sight. If you know what to do, please feel invited to get involved. 

And we welcome another new contributor who finally got involved! Atque developed a simple plugin which shows a window full of buttons four our many time stepping commands 
which were previously only accessible when assigned to hotkeys (section~\ref{sec:plugins:TimeNavigator}). 
We have so many of these commands that it is hard to find a good key layout, though, so until now it was up to you to configure your favourite subset. 
For easy access to these functions, this plugin is very welcome. 
He also implemented dynamic scaling for the Moon, which means a visually enlarged Moon which is so useful for wide-angle views eventually takes its natural size when zooming in, 
and has started fixing long-standing bugs. 


Developing and maintaining a project of this size needs dedication, especially when done as unpaid side occupation. 
Large progress needs funding which is sometimes hard to find. 
We want to thank all sponsors and backers of the project as by last year we had collected substantial funds to support this development also in work hours. 
We like working on this project and would like to be able to run future similar focused improvements, but also must pay our bills, so please keep up your kind support! 




In the name of all prior and current developers we wish you much enjoyment with
this and future versions of the Stellarium desktop planetarium!

\begin{flushright}
Georg Zotti and Alexander Wolf, March 2026
\end{flushright}



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