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.
Key Features
Sky
- Default catalogue of over 600,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue and the Tycho-2 Catalogue.
- Extra catalogues with more than 177 million stars.
- Default catalogue of over 80,000 deep-sky objects
- Asterisms and illustrations of the constellations.
- Constellations for 20+
- 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 grids.
- Star twinkling.
- Shooting stars.
- Eclipse simulation.
- Tails of comets.
- Iridium flares simulation.
- Eclipse simulation.
- Supernovae and novae simulation.
- 3D sceneries
- Skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection.
Customisability
- Plugin system adding artifical satellites, ocular simulation, telescope configuration and more.
- Ability to add new solar system objects from online resources…
- Add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts…
Website: stellarium.org
Support: FAQ, Mailing List, Forum, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Fabien Chereau, Rob Spearman, Johannes Gajdosik, Johan Meuris, Matthew Gates, Nigel Kerr
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Stellarium is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Astronomy Software | |
|---|---|
| Stellarium | A virtual planetarium |
| Gaia Sky | Astronomy visualization desktop and VR program |
| Celestia | Real-time space simulation |
| AstroImageJ | Tool for astronomical image analysis and precise photometry |
| Skychart | Prepare different sky maps for a particular observation |
| KStars | Desktop planetarium for KDE |
| OpenSpace | Interactive data visualization software |
| Aladin Desktop | Interactive sky atlas |
| Virtual Moon Atlas | Real-time moon observation |
| Ginga | FITS image viewer and toolkit |
| Digital Universe Atlas | Standalone 4-dimensional space visualization application |
| XEphem | Motif based ephemeris and planetarium program |
| mars-sim | General purpose simulator |
| Cosmonium | 3D astronomy and space exploration program |
| Tenmon | FITS and XISF image viewer, converter and indexer |
| Kosmorro | Calculate your ephemerides |
| Astra | Observatory control system |
| astroterm | Terminal-based star map |
| Skyviewer | Displays HEALPix-based skymaps |
| skyterm | Terminal-based astronomy program |
| ORSA | Framework for celestial mechanics investigations |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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