Stellarium supports ShowMySky atmosphere model since Stellarium v1.0. This model is available for machines capable of OpenGL 3.3.

Having installed a ShowMySky-enabled version of Stellarium, launch it, open the View dialog (accessible via F4 key), and click Atmosphere settings button (next to Atmosphere visualization checkbox). Atmosphere Details dialog will open, where in the Choose model combobox you can select either Preetham, which is the legacy atmosphere model, or ShowMySky, which is powered by this library.

Having chosen ShowMySky atmosphere, select a path to the atmosphere model data directory in the Path to data field. The model data directory must contain params.atmo file. If it doesn't, it's not a model directory, or some files are missing. The path field marks the path in red if there's no params.atmo file in this directory, or the directory is not accessible.

If loading completes successfully, a text "Loaded successfully" will appear, otherwise a red-colored error message will be displayed.

Eclipse simulation quality

There are four quality levels for simulation of eclipsed atmosphere:

1. This is the most basic, "fail-safe", level, not aimed at any realism — just darkens the sky depending on visibility of the Sun.
2. This level actually activates simulation of first-order scattering of eclipsed atmosphere, and use of a precomputed texture of second order, which is then mixed with non-eclipsed multiple-order scattering to approximate the view of partial eclipses.
3. At this level second-order scattering is simulated in real time, which takes quite a bit of GPU power and needs a fast GPU to achieve acceptable frame rate.
4. At this level second-order scattering is simulated as at level 3, and in addition, first-order is calculated individually for each pixel on the screen. This makes scenes with e.g. eclipse in twilight better-resolved, at the cost of additional loss of frame rate.

Troubleshooting

Some common errors that can happen during loading of the ShowMySky model are discussed below.

Failed to load ShowMySky library: ... No such file or directory

This may be caused by ShowMySky library not having been installed (it comes with the CalcMySky package), or not being in the library search paths.

On GNU/Linux systems libShowMySky.so should usually be under /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib directory tree (e.g. /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libShowMySky.so, or in a non-standard directory added to LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable or listed in /etc/ld.so.conf.

On Windows systems the library should either be in the same directory as Stellarium.exe, or the directory containing ShowMySky.dll should be listed in the PATH environment variable.

ABI version of ShowMySky library is 14, but this program has been compiled against version 13.

If the ShowMySky library has larger value of the ABI version, then Stellarium needs to be recompiled to use it. Otherwise you may need to upgrade the library. A special case is when the ABI version is larger than 500000000. This corresponds to an older versioning scheme. In this case the highest digit should be omitted when comparing versions.