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 0.15.2 changelog:
- Added new algorithm for DeltaT from Stephenson, Morrison and Hohenkerk (2016)
- Added use QOpenGLWidget
- Added new option to InfoString group
- Added orbit visualization data for asteroids
- Added calculation of extincted magnitudes of satellites
- Added new type of Solar system objects: sednoids
- Added classificator of objects into Solar System Editor plugin
- Added albedo for infostring (planets and moons)
- Added some improvements and clean up of code in Search Tool
- Added use ISO 8601 to date formatting in Date and Time Dialog (LP: #1655630)
- Added "Restore direction to initial values" in Oculars plugin (LP: #1656085)
- Added the define for GL_DOUBLE again to restore compilation on ARM.
- Added calculation and show of horizontal and vertical scales of visible field of view of CCD (LP: #1656825)
- Added caching for landscapes, including preloading and some other manipulation via scripting.
- Added binning for CCD in Oculars plugin
- Added textures for DSO
- Added a mean solar day (equals to Earth's day) on the Sun for educational purposes
- Added transmitting map of object info via RemoteControl
- Added int property handling with sliders
- Added a scriptable function to retrieve landscape brightness.
- Added Spout licence.txt to Windows installer script
- Added displaying solstices points (LP: #1670046)
- Added extension of objectInfoMaps per object, most useful for scripting (LP: #1670412)
- Added tentative fix for crash without network (LP: #1667703)
- Added separate storing of view direction/FoV and other settings.
- Added Meade MA12 Astrometric Eyepiece support in Oculars plugin
- Added option to change the prediction depth of Iridium flares (Satellites plugin)
- Added tooltips for AstroCalc features [full release notes]
Download: Stellarium 0.15.2 (32-bit) | 171.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: Stellarium 0.15.2 (64-bit) | 175.0 MB
Screenshots: >> Click here
Link: Stellarium Home Page
