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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|---|---|
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| 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.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |