Huira is a library for space rendering, LiDAR simulation, and solar radiation pressure modeling. It is written in C++, with Python bindings, and is released under the MIT license.

The MIT license covers Huira’s code, not its name or logo.

Background

Huira began as vira, which I developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Vira was named for Viracocha, the creator deity of Inca mythology, who made the Sun, the Moon and the stars.

When I left NASA, vira and its names stayed behind. Huira is a complete rewrite, built from scratch with new code, and its name keeps the connection: Huiracocha is another spelling of Viracocha. In the same way, Huira is a new “implementation” of vira.

Media and data

media.huira.space holds the files that are too large to keep in git, or that several of Huira’s sites and repositories share:

  • The data the examples use: 3D models such as NASA’s Gateway, textures of the Earth and planets, and the Tycho-2 star catalog in Huira’s format. Each example lists the files it needs, with a curl command to download each one.
  • Past versions of prebuilt files.
  • Alternative datasets to the ones the examples use.
  • The renders on this site, in the documentation, and in the example READMEs.

Keeping these out of the repositories keeps them small to clone, and gives every file a permanent address to download from in your own scripts.

The data comes from NASA, NAIF, ESA and CDS, and Solar System Scope, each under its own terms, and Huira’s MIT license does not cover it. In particular, the Tycho-2 star catalog is licensed for non-commercial use only. See Data Sources and Licenses for each dataset’s license and how to credit it.

Citing Huira

If you use Huira in published work, please cite it. On GitHub, select Cite this repository in the sidebar for APA and BibTeX, or use:

@software{gnam_huira,
  author    = {Gnam, Christopher},
  title     = {Huira},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23333475},
  url       = {https://github.com/huira-render/huira}
}

Please also note which version of Huira you used.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting a pull request. To ask for a feature, open a feature request.