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.
Features:
Sky:
- default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
- extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
- asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
- constellations for 15 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
- supernovae simulation
- 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...
Changelog:
Yes, the series 0.12 is LTS for owners of old computers (old with weak graphics cards). This release has ports of some features from the series 1.x/0.15:
- textures for deep-sky objects
- star catalogues
- fixes for MPC search tool in Solar System Editor plugin
OS: Windows / Mac OS X / Linux
Language: Multilingual
Homepage: http://stellarium.sourceforge.net/
Changelog: http://sourceforge.net/p/stellarium/news/
Download Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium/files/
Installer:
x86
x64 not yet updated
Extra Files:
Additional Stars: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium/files/Extra-data-files/
Landscapes: http://stellarium.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Landscapes
Textures: http://stellarium.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Textures