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 0.10.2

Price Free to download Size 33.6MB 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 Selected Reviews: Softpedia, Linux.com, vnunet.com

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...

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 Sunday, January 24 2010 @ 06:30 AM EST