Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.
Stellarium key features:
- Realistic simulation of the sky, sunrise and sunset
- Default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
- Downloadable additional catalogues for up to 210 million stars
- Catalog data for all New General Catalogue (NGC) objects
- Images of almost all Messier objects and the Milky Way
- Artistic illustrations for all 88 modern constellations
- More than a dozen different cultures with their constellations
- Solar and lunar eclipse simulation
- Photorealistic landscapes (more are available on the website)
- Scripting support with ECMAScript (a few demo scripts are included)
- Extendable with plug-ins: 8 plug-ins installed by default, including:
- artificial satellites plug-in (updated from an on-line TLE database)
- ocular simulation plug-in (shows how objects look like in a given ocular)
- Solar System editor plug-in (imports comet and asteroid data from the MPC)
- telescope control plug-in (Meade LX200 and Celestron NexStar compatible)
What"s new in this version:
- New modulated core.
- Refactored shadows and introducing the normal mapping.
- Sporadic meteors and meteors has the colors now.
- Comet tails rendering.
- New translatable strings and new textures.
- New plugin: Equation of Time - provides solution for Equation of Time.
- New plugin: Field of View - provides shortcuts for quick changes field of view.
- New plugin: Navigational Stars - marks 58 navigational stars on the sky.
- New plugin: Pointer Coordinates - shows the coordinates of the mouse pointer.
- New plugin: Meteor Showers - provides visualization of meteor showers.
- New version of the Satellites plugin: introduces star-like satellites and bug fixes.
- New version of the Exoplanets plugin: displaying of the potential habitable exoplanets; improvements for performance and code refactoring.
- New version of the Angle Measure plugin: displaying of the position angle.
- New version of the Quasars plugin: improvements for performance; added marker_color parameter.
- New version of the Pulsars plugin: improvements for performance; display pulsars with glitches; setting color for marker for different types of the pulsars.
- New versions of the Compass Marks, Oculars, Historical Supernovae, Observability analysis and Bright Novae plugins: bug fixing, code refactoring and improvements.
- There have also been a large number of bug fixes and serious performance improvements.
Download: Stellarium 0.13 | 102.0 MB (Open Source)
Screenshot: >> Click here
Link: Stellarium Home Page