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)

03/12/2008
Developer documentation online
To help new developers, both within the project and to encourage third party plugin developers, we've been spending some time to flesh out the API documentation and have put it online.

See the latest API docs here: http://www.stellarium.org/doc/head/ (0 comments)

27/11/2008
Work continues on the next release
Work continues towards the next release. Telescope control key bindings have been reimplemented although there is no GUI for telescope configuration as yet.

The new script engine is becoming pretty usable, and although there are still some features of the old engine which are not yet implemented in the new, the flexibility of the ECMA language makes it possible to do all sorts of cool things which were not possible before.

There's also a bunch of bug fixes including some long-standing ones with the grid and line rendering.

We still do not have a date for the next release, but the progress has been pretty good in the last month or two. (0 comments)

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)

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