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

The Stellarium team is delighted to announce the release of Stellarium 0.22.1.

The major changes of this version:

  • Added fixed equatorial grid/line
  • Added new sky cultures
  • Fixed building Stellarium (AppImage)
  • Updated DSO catalog

Enjoy!

Full list of changes:

  • Added Khoikhoi and San sky culture (GH: #2396)
  • Added Xhosa sky culture (GH: #2395)
  • Added fixed equatorial grid/line (GH: #2399)
  • Added DSO names (GH: #2387)
  • Fixed building AppImage/x86_64 package
  • Fixes various typos in sky cultures (GH: #2400)
  • Fixed rendering 3D models for solar system bodies (GH: #2367)
  • Changed screenshots naming: properly detect largest screenshot number (GH: #2379)
  • Updated DSO catalog (v3.15): updated visual magnitudes for Messier objects from RNGC/IC catalog by Wolfgang Steinicke (GH: #2375)
  • Updated designations of stars (GH: #2391)
  • Updated licence statement for few sky cultures