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)
The major changes of this version:
- We have finally completed our work on accurate planet axes, including Lunar libration
- Visualisation of Earth shadow for Lunar eclipses
- Better texture for the Lunar surface
- Added the latest algorithms for planet magnitudes
- Enhanced Calendars plugin
- Replaced "arabic" by more accurate "al-Sufi" skyculture
- Planets are now scalable and Solar glare switchable for didactic applications [full release notes]
Download: Stellarium 0.21.0 (32-bit) | 254.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: Stellarium 0.21.0 (64-bit) | 257.0 MB
View: Stellarium Home Page | Other Operating Systems