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 0.11.2

sky

  • default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
  • extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
  • asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
  • constellations for twelve 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

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...

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)

2012/03/10
Stellarium 0.11.2 released!

Stellarium 0.11.2 has been released. Stellarium is a photo-realistic, general-purpose astronomy software. http://stellarium.org

Stellarium 0.11.2 is a stable version that introduces some new features and closes 47 bug and wishlist reports. A lot of work has been done on making translatable text that wasn't localized before. This includes most of the text used by the default plug-ins, landscapes, countries, script names and descriptions. The Oculars plug-in now has an optional control panel with buttons for those affected by the "missing menu" bug, but it needs to be enabled in the Oculars configuration window. An feature for importing new satellites has been added to the Satellites plug-in, so be sure to reset its settings to get the new data sources. A more detailed change log follows below.

A huge thanks to the people who helped us a lot by reporting bugs!

Change log:

One of the main directions of this version is localization:

  • most of the text used by the default plug-ins is now translatable
  • landscape names are now translatable
  • country names are now translatable
  • scripts names and descriptions are now translatable

Oculars plug-in:

  • added an optional control panel displayed in the upper-right corner of the screen as an alternative to the pop-up menu that was used to control it in the previous version;
  • overhaul of the pop-up menu, the underlined letters in it can be used as keyboard shortcuts;
  • added the ability to rearrange the items in the lists of oculars, telescopes and sensors;
  • fixed the inappropriate flipping of the binoculars view;

Satellites plug-in:

  • fixed title bar of the Satellites config window not being resized with the rest of the window (LP: #900575)
  • catalog numbers are now used to identify satellites, preventing bugs with duplicate satellites and satellites renamed in the source lists
  • catalog number and international designator are now displayed for each satellite
  • a simple windows to add satellites has been added (LP: #898476)

Added:

  • Ctrl+C binding to copy selected object info text to clipboard.
  • to the Windows installer options to remove files left over from the previous installation.
  • windows no longer can be dragged to unreachable positions.
  • the "Save settings" button now saves the current main window position, too.
  • the language list is now sorted by language name, not language code.
  • the "Reload style" action has been removed, as the underlying feature no longer works. If you decide to design a new visual style for Stellarium, please contact us to give you a version where it works.
  • distance in km (if the distance is below 0.1 AU) to the information displayed about Solar System objects. (LP: #894472)
  • the StelGui::getSkyGui() method to allow plug-in developers to create their own toolbars and other GUI elements.
  • an option to show the galactic coordinates grid and the galactic plane.
  • several trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs): Sedna, Quaoar, Orcus, Haumea.
  • the Quasars plug-in.
  • the Pulsars plug-in.
  • more detailed information is now added to the log file for Mac OS X.
  • (experimental) modelling of atmospheric extinction for point objects.
  • changed the position of the text in the Text User Interface plug-in. (LP: #911594)
  • a checkbox allowing the SIMBAD on-line search to be enabled/disabled.

Fixed:

  • startup script crash (LP: #689657)
  • plugin names localization in the Configuration window (LP: #807402)
  • resizing of the tabs in Configuration and View windows on language change (LP: #821386)
  • sky lines' labels not translated on language change (LP: #811659)
  • "Get catalog" button not translated on language change (LP: #890608)
  • last star catalog not being offered for download (LP: #538291, LP: #890789)
  • proxy configuration without username/password
  • Telescope Control plug-in: mishandling of IP connections in the telescope configuration window (LP: #843837)
  • Pluto's moon Hydra preventing the constellation from being selected in Search and scripts (LP: #894780)
  • scripting code still being included despite ENABLE_SCRIPTING set to 0 (LP: #811505)
  • constellations lines and names not displayed (LP: #945146)
  • newly created location cannot be set as default (LP: #889931)

End!

2011/11/11
Stellarium 0.11.1 available for Ubuntu

Stellarium 0.11.1 is now available via a Launchpad PPA (Personal Package Archive) for all five currently supported versions of Ubuntu: from 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx to the still-in-development 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin.

Stellarium's Ubuntu Releases PPA can be found at Launchpad:

https://launchpad.net/~stellarium/+archive/stellarium-releases

To get the updated Stellarium packages, you need to add the following line to your system's Software Sources:

ppa:stellarium/stellarium-releases

This can be done either in the Software Center, the Synaptic package manager or the command line. After that, install or update Stellarium as you do normally.

To add the repository via the command line, open a terminal and run the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stellarium/stellarium-releases

sudo apt-get update

2011/11/11
Stellarium Daily Builds for Ubuntu

If you are an Ubuntu user and you wish to test the very latest development code, Stellarium now provides a Daily Builds PPA:

https://code.launchpad.net/~stellarium/+archive/daily

The packages are built directly from the latest version of the development code. They are updated once per day or less often, if there are no changes to the code.

WARNING! These packages are UNSTABLE! Use them at your own risk. At the very least, don't use them if you don't know how to downgrade Stellarium's package to a previous version.

2011/11/04
Stellarium 0.11.1 has been released!

The Stellarium team is proud to announce the release of version 0.11.1. This is an important bug fix release closing more than 20 bugs in the main application and in the plug-ins. It also brings small GUI usability improvements. A huge thanks to all community bug reporters who helped us a lot finding bugs! You can find the full list of changes the change log.

We have updated the configuration file and the Solar System file, so if you have an existing Stellarium installation, you need to reset the settings after you install the new version.

2011/07/22
Stellarium in SOCIS 2011

Are you a student looking for an exciting summer job? Get paid this summer to work on Stellarium!

We were selected to be a mentoring organization for the ESA Summer of Code in Space 2011: a program funding european students for working on astronomy open source projects. Please review our ideas page and submit your application on http://sophia.estec.esa.int/socis2011/?q=node/13

Hurry up! The application deadline is on July 27th at 11am UTC

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