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:
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New projection: Equirectangular (fills the screen)
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Improved rendering of Milky Way, Zodiacal Light and landscapes
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Improved rendering of the Moon
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Improved HiDPI behaviour
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Use Noto as default font
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Added Modern (IAU), Tikuna and Seri sky cultures
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Added Chinese and Bahai calendars (Calendars plugin)
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Behind the scenes, several minor issues were fixed. [full list of changes]
Download: Stellarium 1.2 (64-bit) | 392.0 MB (Open Source)
View: Stellarium Home Page | Other Operating Systems