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)
Release notes:
Version 0.15.1 introduces a few new exciting features.
- The Digital Sky Survey (DSS) can be shown (requires online connection).
- AstroCalc is now available from the main menu and gives interesting new computational insight.
- Stellarium can act as Spout sender (important for multimedia environments; Windows only).
In addition, a lot of bugs have been fixed:
- wait() and waitFor() in the Scripting Engine no longer inhibits performance of moves.
- DE430/431 DeltaT may be OK now. We still want to test a bit more, though.
- ArchaeoLines also offers two arbitrary declination lines.
- Added support of time zones dependent by location.
- Added new skyculture: Sardinian.
- Added updates and improvements in catalogs.
- Added improvements in the GUI.
- Added cross identification data for stars from Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Ed. (Hoffleit+, 1991)
Full list of changes you can read here: https://launchpad.net/stellarium/0.15/0.15.1
Download: Stellarium 0.15.1 (32-bit) | 163.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: Stellarium 0.15.1 (64-bit) | 166.0 MB
Screenshots: >> Click here
Link: Stellarium Home Page