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)
Changes between version 0.14.1 and 0.14.2:
- Reduce planet brightness in daylight
- Fixed perspective mode with offset viewport in scenery3d
- Fixed wrong altitudes for some locations
- Fixed some skyculture links
- Fixed editing some shortcut keys
- Fixed drawing reticle for telescope
- Fixed wrong altitude of culmination in Observability plugin
- Fixed connection troubles in Telescope Control Plugin on Windows
- Refactoring coloring markers of the DSO
- Removed info about Moon phases (avoid inconsistency for strings).
- Updated default config options
- Updated icons for View dialog
- Updated Stellarium DSO Catalog
- Added list of dwarf galaxies (Search Tool)
- Added improvements in Scenery 3D plugin
Download: Stellarium 0.14.2 | 138.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: Stellarium 64-bit | 141.0 MB
Screenshots: >> Click here
Link: Stellarium Home Page