Stellarium: Tour the Universe from your Armchair with Stellarium (Windows or Mac or Linux)
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.
Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time with OpenGL. It displays stars, constellations, planets, nebulas and others things like ground, landscape, atmosphere, etc.
features:
sky:
* over 120,000 stars from the Hipparcos catalogue with info
* asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
* images of nebulae
* realistic Milky Way
* very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
* the planets and their satellites
interface:
* a powerful zoom
* time control
* multilingual interface
* scripting to record and play your own shows
* fisheye projection for planetarium domes
* spheric mirror projection for your own dome
* 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...
A modified version of Stellarium is used in portable planetarium projectors sold by co-developer Digitalis Education Solutions.
Note: The Stellarium software project is not related to stellarium.com, who offer custom built physical star map displays for use in museums.
Software Santa Owns this! A Software Santa Pick! http://www.stellarium.org/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium/files/latest/downloadCategories: Educational - Planetarium - Graphics - Linux - Create Landscapes - Windows - Astronomy - Mac X Intel - Mac X PPC - Tour the Universe - scripting to record and play back your own planetarium shows / tours of the universe - Hobbies