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 0.16.1 is bugfix release with some important features:
- Added moons of Saturn, Uranus and Pluto
- Added improvements for AstroCalc tool
- DSO catalog was updated to version 3.2:
- Added support "The Strasbourg-ESO Catalogue of Galactic Planetary Nebulae" (Acker+, 1992)
- Added support "A catalogue of Galactic supernova remnants" (Green, 2014)
- Added support "A Catalog of Rich Clusters of Galaxies" (Abell+, 1989)
- Added support asterisms and outlines for DSO
- Added improvements for the GUI [full list of changes]
Download: Stellarium 0.16.1 (32-bit) | Stellarium for XP (32-bit) | 190.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: Stellarium 0.16.1 (64-bit) | 194.0 MB
View: Stellarium Home Page | Stellarium Screenshots