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 23.1 release notes
PLEASE UPDATE!
- This issue mitigates a potential security issue (reported as CVE-2023-28371), where scripts were allowed to write output text and screenshots to other places on users" systems apart from the Stellarium user data directory or configured screenshot directory. Running unknown scripts (which is a Bad Idea(tm) to begin with) could have exploited that by attackers (script authors) writing even command files to vulnerable places. We have not received a report where this would have caused a problem. However, now users must explicitly allow such behaviour in the settings tab of the Script Console.
Apart from that, this release mostly aimed at fixing issues in the 1.* series, but also brought a few new features:
- Much improved "Solar System observer" and other "Planet observers".
- Solar dates along the ecliptic
- Fixed issues with Observation Lists, and removed need for the extra edit dialog.
- Updated shader code for smoother projection
- Allow texture decimation on the fly for very weak systems like Raspberry Pi 3.
- Solar limb darkening
- Proper shadow edge for satellites
- Behind the scenes, many more minor issues were fixed. [full release notes]
Download: Stellarium 23.1 (64-bit) | 343.0 MB (Open Source)
View: Stellarium Home Page | Other Operating Systems