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)
Stellarium 0.13.1 changelog:
- Added: Light layer for old_style landscapes
- Added: Auto-detect location via network lookup.
- Added: Seasonal rules for displaying constellations
- Added: Coordinates can be displayed as decimal degrees (LP: #1106743)
- Added: Support of multi-touch gestures on Windows 8 (LP: #1165754)
- Added: FOV on bottom bar can be displayed in DMS rather than fractional degrees (LP: #1361582)
- Added: Oculars plugins support eyepieces with permanent crosshairs (LP: #1364139)
- Added: Pointer Coordinates Plugin can displayed not only RA/Dec (J2000.0) (LP: #1365784, #1377995)
- Added: Angle Measure Plugin can measure positional angles to the horizon now (LP: #1208143)
- Added: Search tool can search position not only for RA/Dec (J2000.0) (LP: #1358706)
- Fixed: Galactic plane renamed to correct: Galactic equator (LP: #1367744)
- Fixed: Speed issues when computing lots of comets (LP: #1350418)
- Fixed: Spherical mirror distortion work correctly now (LP: #676260, #1338252)
- Fixed: Location coordinates on the bottom bar displayed correctly now (LP: #1357799)
- Fixed: Ecliptic coordinates for J2000.0 and grids diplayed correctly now (LP: #1366567, #1369166)
- Fixed: Rule for select a celestial objects (LP: #1357917)
- Fixed: Loading extra star catalogs (LP: #1329500, #1379241)
- Fixed: Creates spurious directory on startup (LP: #1357758)
- Fixed: Various GUI/rendering improvements (LP: #1380502, #1320065, #1338252, #1096050, #1376550, #1382689)
- Fixed: "missing disk in drive
" (LP: #1371183)
Download: Stellarium 0.13.1 | 129.0 MB (Open Source)
Screenshots: >> Click here
Link: Stellarium Home Page