screen preview
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. view screenshots

features

in version 0.10.0

sky

  • default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
  • extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
  • asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
  • constellations for eleven different cultures
  • images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
  • realistic Milky Way
  • very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
  • the planets and their satellites

interface

  • a powerful zoom
  • time control
  • multilingual interface
  • fisheye projection for planetarium domes
  • spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome
  • all new graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
  • telescope control

visualisation

  • equatorial and azimuthal grids
  • star twinkling
  • shooting stars
  • eclipse simulation
  • skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection

customisability

  • add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts...

wiki

The wiki is the place where stellarium users maintain all the knowledge about the program, and where you can contribute as well.

news

SourceForge.net: SF.net Project News: Stellarium (including full news text)

13/10/2008
A look into the future
This article shines a little light onto a possible future feature of Stellarium - dynamically downloadable full-sky imagery, like Google Earth's Sky feature and MS's World Wide Telescope.

http://stellarium.org/articles/dss_preview/dss_preview.php (0 comments)

25/09/2008
Version 0.10.0 features
Check out this article for a list of 10 great features in the new release:

http://stellarium.org/features_in_0.10.0.php (2 comments)

24/09/2008
Stellarium: 0.10.0 has been released!
Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time with OpenGL. It displays stars, constellations, planets, nebulas and others things like ground, landscape, atmosphere, etc.


The Stellarium team is proud to announce the release of version 0.10.0 (beta). This major release is the result of 8 months of efforts totalizing almost 1000 commits from all team members.

The most important changes are the new redesigned GUI, an important performance and memory usage improvement, a faster start-up, as well as new features such as dynamic eye adaptation to bright objects, improved rendering, light pollution simulation or improved location selector. The source code was also massively cleaned and refactored.

This version lacks two features from previous releases, namely the text user interface and the script engine which are being recoded for a later release. Because of this, the release is labeled "beta". (3 comments)

05/09/2008
Call to Translators
Stellarium 0.10.0 is nearing its release, so we hereby ask translators to try and update the translations. If you can help, please go here: https://translations.launchpad.net/stellarium/0.10

RC1 is expected within a week or so; if everything goes well, version 0.10.0 will follow shortly. (0 comments)

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