Stellarium
A realistic, real-time 3D simulation of the night sky.
Screenshots
Description
Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time with OpenGL. It displays stars, constellations, planets, nebulae and others things like ground, landscape, atmosphere, etc.
Stellarium Web SiteFeatures
- Realistic simulation of the sky, sunrise and sunset
- Default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
- Downloadable additional catalogues for up to 210 million stars
- Catalog data for all New General Catalogue (NGC) objects
- Images of almost all Messier objects and the Milky Way
- Artistic illustrations for all 88 modern constellations
- More than a dozen different cultures with their constellations
- Solar and lunar eclipse simulation
- Photorealistic landscapes (more are available on the website)
- Scripting support with ECMAScript (a few demo scripts are included)
- Extendable with plug-ins: 8 plug-ins installed by default, including:
- artificial satellites plug-in (updated from an on-line TLE database)
- ocular simulation plug-in (shows how objects look like in a given ocular)
- Solar System editor plug-in (imports comet and asteroid data from the MPC)
- telescope control plug-in (Meade LX200 and Celestron NexStar compatible)
User Ratings
User Reviews
-
Very realistic looking starry skies. Recommend for all those who enjoy looking up at the stars in wonder!
-
I truly, honestly love Stellarium. It's soooo beautiful!
-
Beautiful and awesome! It lets me get interested in astronomy.
-
Wow, the images are truly amazing. I have never seen anything like it.
-
Really fabulous. For a free program, this rocks. I'm running Mac OSX (Snow Leopard) and it works beautifully so far with few glitches or problems. Most of the commands/controls are easy to figure out just by playing around a bit. Really has a lot of features and things you can customize to your particular area (I even found a landscape of my area to use with it). Highly recommended!
-
Once you get everything tweaked "just so" this is really quite an excellent program. And the beauty part of it (other than the nice graphics) is that it is updated from time to time.