Stella (software)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Stella_(software)".

Screenshot from Great Stella software, showing the stellation diagram and net for the compound of five tetrahedra

Screenshot from Stella4D, looking at the truncated tesseract in perspective and its net, truncated cube cells hidden.

Stella, a computer program available in three versions (Great Stella, Small Stella and Stella4D) was created by Robert Webb of Australia. The programs contain a large library of polyhedra which can be manipulated and altered in various ways.

Polyhedra in Great Stella's library include the Platonic Solids, the Archimedean solids, the Kepler-Poinsot solids, the Johnson solids, some Johnson Solid near-misses, numerous compounds including the uniform polyhedra, and other polyhedra too numerous to list here. Operations which can be performed on these polyhedra include stellation, faceting, augmentation, dualization (also called "reciprocation"), creating convex hulls, and others.

All versions of the program enable users to print nets for polyhedra. These nets may then be assembled into actual three-dimensional polyhedral models of great beauty and complexity.

In 2007, a Stella4D version was added, allowing the generation and display of four dimensional polytopes (polychora), including a library of all convex uniform polychora, and all currently known nonconvex star polychora, as well as the uniform duals. They can be selected from a library or generated from user created polyhedral vertex figure files.

Release history

• v1.0 - 20th August 2001 - First release of Stella
• v2.0 - 12th September 2002
• v3.0 - 12th June 2005
  • v3.5 - 16th March 2006
    • v3.5.1 - 10th May 2006
• v4.0 - 13th March 2007 - newest version (Including new "Stella4D")
  • v4.1 - 24th March 2007
  • v4.2 - 27th June 2007
  • v4.3 - 2nd November 2007
  • v4.4 - 11th January 2008

References

• PC Plus magazine included a review of Great Stella by Mike Bedford in issue 271, August 2008, p46-47. "This is quite a sophisticated program for those who want to go beyond the basics" - Mike Bedford
• Australia's Today Show presented Stella as part of their I.T. segment on 4 February 2003 (screenshots)

External links

• Stella homepage
• Stella: Polyhedron Navigator - Paper published in Symmetry: Culture and Science, Volume 11, Numbers 1-4, 231-268, 2000 contents (Note: journal was back-dated. Paper actually written 2003)
• Stella Models - Paper published in Symmetry: Culture and Science, Volume 13, Numbers 3-4, 391-399, 2002 contents (Note: journal was back-dated. Paper actually written 2004)