Stellarium
Stellarium is a
software project that allows people to use their home computer as a
virtual planetarium. It calculates the positions of the Sun and Moon,
planets and stars, and draws how the sky would look to an observer
depending on their location and the time. It can also draw the
constellations and simulate astronomical phenomena such as meteor
showers, and solar or lunar eclipses.
Stellarium can be used as an educational tool for teaching
about the night sky, or as an observational aide for amateur
astronomers wishing to plan a night’s observing
It renders the skies in realtime using OpenGL.
Because of the high quality of the graphics that Stellarium
produces, it is used in some real planetarium projector
products.
Some
amateur astronomy groups use it to create sky maps for describing
regions of the sky in articles for newsletters and magazines.
Stellarium 0.12.0
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Price
Free to download
Size
55.2MB
License
GNU GPL v2
Developer
Fabien Chereau, Rob Spearman, Johannes Gajdosik,
Johan Meuris, Matthew Gates, Nigel Kerr
Website
www.stellarium.org
System Requirements
A graphics card capable of rendering OpenGL.
Support
Sites:
User
Guide, Wiki,
Scripts,
Mailing
List, SourceForge
Project Page
Selected
Reviews:
Softpedia,
Linux.com,
makeuseof
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Features include:
Sky
- Default catalogue of over 600,000 stars from the Hipparcos
Catalogue and the Tycho-2 Catalogue
- Extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
- Asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
- Constellations for ten different cultures
- Images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
- Realistic Milky Way
- Realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
- The planets and their satellites
Interface
- A powerful zoom
- Time control
- Multilingual interface
- Scripting to record and play your own shows
- Fisheye projection for planetarium domes
- Spheric mirror projection for your own dome
- Graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
- Telescope control
Visualisation
- Equatorial and azimuthal grid
- Star twinkling
- Shooting stars
- Eclipse simulation
- Skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection
Customisability
- Add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation
images, scripts...
Return
to Scientific Home Page | Return
to Astronomy Home Page
Stellarium also features in our 'Linux
Equivalents to Windows Software' section. The category
selector below allows you to filter the different types of software
included in that separate article.
Last Updated Saturday, April 13 2013 @ 05:26 PM EDT
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