Last Updated on January 25, 2026
astroterm is a planetarium for your terminal.
Explore stars, planets, constellations, and more, all rendered right in the command line. No telescope is required.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Highly Customizable: Choose any date, time, and location to explore past, present, or future celestial events.
- Accurate Rendering: View the moon, stars, and planets with as much precision as terminal graphics allow.
- Performance optimized: Lightweight and fast ASCII rendering.
- Moon Phases: Precise lunar phases in real-time.
- Label stars brighter than a specified magnitude. Also only render stars brighter than a specified magnitude.
- Constellation Figures: Detailed constellation shapes.
- Draw an azimuthal grid. Azimuthal means relating to or measured in terms of an angle between a reference direction and a point on the horizon.
- Enable terminal colors.
- Display metadata.
- Set the frames per second, and animation speed.
- Use unicode characters.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Website: github.com/da-luce/astroterm
Support:
Developer: Dalton Luce
License: MIT License
astroterm is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
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| ORSA | Framework for celestial mechanics investigations |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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