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.
Sky
- default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
- extra catalogues with more than 177 million stars
- default catalogue of over 80,000 deep-sky objects
- extra catalogue with more than 1 million deep-sky objects
- asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
- constellations for 20+ 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
- tails of comets
- iridium flares simulation
- eclipse simulation
- supernovae and novae simulation
- 3D sceneries
- skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection
Customizability
- plugin system adding artifical satellites, ocular simulation, telescope configuration and more
- ability to add new solar system objects from online resources…
- add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts…
Operating Systems Supported: Linux/Unix; Windows 7 and above; Mac OS X 10.12.0 and above
The main site can be found here:
There is also a web version available:
Recommend0 recommendationsPublished in Astronomy/Star Finding
This software is magnificent. Still and video images are easily captured off of the screen and can be used to illustrate and teach any number of useful astronomical concepts with terrific clarity. Hats off to the authors, and to their decision to make their product free and open source.