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.
Feature list:
- Basic controls
- Look around by mousedragging, or moving your mouse against the edges of the window
- Time control: forward, backward, return to present
- Zoom
- Tabbed configuration windows
- Text user interface: minimalistic menu for use with dome projections
- Clickable world cities map to set coordinates
- Save your default location
Observation
- All stars from the Hipparcos catalogue
- The planets of our solar system, and their natural satellites
- All Messier objects
- All NGC objects
- Planet orbits
- Cardinal points
- Azimuthal grid
- Equatorial grid and more...
- Release Notes not available at the time of this News post.