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.

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
• 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...

What's New:

• Added new algorithm for DeltaT from Stephenson, Morrison and Hohenkerk (2016)
• Added use QOpenGLWidget
• Added new option to InfoString group
• Added orbit visualization data for asteroids
• Added calculation of extincted magnitudes of satellites
• Added new type of Solar system objects: sednoids
• Added classificator of objects into Solar System Editor plugin
• Added albedo for infostring (planets and moons)
• Added some improvements and clean up of code in Search Tool
• Added use ISO 8601 to date formatting in Date and Time Dialog (LP: #1655630)
• Added "Restore direction to initial values" in Oculars plugin (LP: #1656085)
• Added the define for GL_DOUBLE again to restore compilation on ARM.
• Added calculation and show of horizontal and vertical scales of visible field of view of CCD (LP: #1656825)
• Added caching for landscapes, including preloading and some other manipulation via scripting.
• Added binning for CCD in Oculars plugin
• Added textures for DSO
• Added a mean solar day (equals to Earth's day) on the Sun for educational purposes
• Added transmitting map of object info via RemoteControl
• Added int property handling with sliders
• Added a scriptable function to retrieve landscape brightness.
• Added Spout licence.txt to Windows installer script
• Added displaying solstices points (LP: #1670046)
• Added extension of objectInfoMaps per object, most useful for scripting (LP: #1670412)
• Added tentative fix for crash without network (LP: #1667703)
• Added separate storing of view direction/FoV and other settings.
• Added Meade MA12 Astrometric Eyepiece support in Oculars plugin
• Added option to change the prediction depth of Iridium flares (Satellites plugin)
• Added tooltips for AstroCalc features
• Fixed indirect dependency to QtOpenGL by QtMultimediaWidgets (LP: #1656525)
• Fixed text encoding in installer (LP: #1652515)
• Fixed changing value of n.dot in tooltip when ephemeris type is changed (LP: #1652762)
• Fixed mistakes in DeltaT stuff
• Fixed typos in AstroCalc tool
• Fixed visual style for spinup/spindown markers
• Fixed missing cross-id of Epsilon Lyrae (LP: #1653388)
• Fixed updating a list of Solar system bodies in AstroCalc tool when new objects added or objects was removed
• Fixed calculation of period for comets on elliptial orbits
• Fixed prediction of Iridium flares (LP: #1643311)
• Fixed saving visibility flag for Bookmarks button (LP: #1654164)
• Fixed refraction for Satellites (LP: #1654331)
• Fixed wrong parallax and distance for IC 59 (LP: #1655423)
• Fixed updating a text in Help window when shortcuts are changed (LP: #1656001)
• Fixed saving flags of visibility of Milky Way and Zodiacal Light (LP: #1656067)
• Fixed memory leaks
• Fixed few reports of Clang static analyzer
• Fixed double clicks causing crashes (LP: #1656525)
• Fixed packaging QtOpenGL in Windows/macOS packages
• Fixed handling a log lines with missing newline char
• Fixed a bad-value crash in ArchaeoLines plugin
• Fixed an invalid escape sequence in RemoteControl plugin
• Fixed bug in Search Tool (LP: #1655055)
• Fixed doing a screenshots (do it via FBO solution for QOpenGLWidget)
• Fixed work a button for ArchaeoLines plugin
• Fixed calculation and rendering CCD frame in Oculars plugin
• Fixed an memory leak with the spheric mirror distorter, and removed stencil buffer from the effect FBO (we don't need it for our rendering) (LP: #1661375)
• Fixed tile-based render performance (always glClear all buffers at the start of the frame) (LP: #1661375)
• Fixed glClear alpha channel usage (glClear alpha to zero instead of one)
• Fixed Scenery3d cubemap rendering (restores rendering)
• Fixed crash, when location 'Sierra Nevada Observatory, Spain' is chosen (LP: #1662113)
• Fixed NetBSD and OpenBSD build by linking glues with Qt5::Gui.
• Fixed size for few DSO textures (NPOT textures for ancient GPUs) (LP: #1641773)
• Fixed crash, when missing a stars catalog from the middle of list (e.g. stars4 is missing and we tried zooming) (LP: #1653315)
• Fixed crash for configure color of generic DSO marker (LP: #1667787)
• Fixed date limit in AstroCalc tool (Set a minimum possible date limit for the range of dates for
• QDateTimeEdit widgets) (LP: #1660208)
• Fixed escaping of symbols for Simbad Lookup (LP: #1669088)
• Fixed DE431 mismatch (LP: #1606583)
• Fixed overbright Sun when zooming in (LP: #1421173)
• Fixed absolute magnitude calculation of the planets, their moons, and the Pluto-Charon system (LP: #1664143)
• Fixed a long-standing bug concerning centering small-fov views in equatorial mount mode (LP: #1484976)
• Fixed influencing sky luminance/eye adaptation for bright objects covered by the landscape horizon. (LP: #1138533)
• Fixed atmospheric brightening by Earth's moon when location is on other planets (LP: #1673283)
• Fixed application of DE43x DeltaT when date outside range of the selected DE43x.
• Fixed Night mode issue for binocular mode of Oculars Plugin (LP: #1673187)
• Fixed altitude computation for landscapes
• Fixed a small error in that Zodiacal light was aligned with Ecliptic J2000, not Ecliptic of date (LP: #1628765)
• Fixed crash Stellarium in debug mode on OS X with Qt 5.7+, through clear GL error state after using QPainter (LP: #1628072)
• Fixed a problem with Qt timezone handling, when some IANA timezones have been renamed compared to entries in our location database (LP: #1662132)
• Allows SkyImages in all reference frames and deprecate the old explicit core.loadSkyImageAltAz() type commands
• Updated rules for usage of custom time zones (the custom time zone may be use in all time now) (LP: #1652763)
• Updated shortcuts
• Updated rules for source package builder
• Updated URL of DSS collection
• Updated detect of OS
• Updated deployment rules for Windows installer
• Updated script for building Stellarium User Guide
• Updated GUI for set coefficients for custom equation of DeltaT
• Updated list of contributors
• Updated ArchaeoLines and Gridlines options to RemoteControl pages
• Updated Tongan sky culture
• Updated catalog of DSO
• Updated common names of DSO
• Updated star names (LP: #1664671)
• Updated Solar System Screen Saver.
• Updated Oculars plugin
• Updated Satellites plugin (Let's start looking to the Iridium on 15 seconds before flash)
• Updated plist data for macOS
• Updated textures of minor planets
• Updated default color scheme
• Removed code for automatic tuning star scales of the view through ocular/CCD (LP: #1656940)
• Code clean-up
• Prevent an unnecessary StelProperty change
• Changed the way the OpenGL format is set once again