Stellarium is a useful software that renders realistic skies in real time with openGL.
It is available for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.
Here are some key features of "Stellarium":
· Over 120000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue with name and infos for the brightest ones.
· Planets and major satellites in real time (position computation now accurate enough for eclipse or transit simulation).
· Drawing of the 88 constellations with their names.
· Mythological figures of the 88 constellations.
· Textured displaying of more than 70 nebulas (Orion, M31 etc..).
· Photo-realistic Milky Way.
· Star twinkling.
· Shooting Stars.
· Skinable landscape (ground, fog, mapping of fisheye pictures).
· Ultra fast realistic atmosphere rendering (Sunsets, sunrises etc...).
· Automatic eye adaptation to sky luminance using physiologic model.
· Grids in Equatorial and Azimuthal coordinates.
· Equator and ecliptic coordinates lines.
· Smooth real time intuitive navigation.
· Powerfull zoom to see planet and nebula like in a telescope.
· Equatorial and altazimutal mount mode.
· Standard perspective and wide angle (fisheye) projections modes (e.g for planetarium dome).
· Time control (real time and accelered time modes).
· Graphical menu for simple utilisation.
· Clikable stars, planets and nebulas with informations.
· Windowed and fullscreen modes.
· Full dome (180?) projection mode for planetariums.
· Text user interface for planetariums.
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Based on Qt 4.5.
· Display constellations lines using nicely distorted arcs.
· Fixed GUI problems when creating a new location.
· Fixed the grid lines wrap around at the discontinuities in cylindrical and Mercator projection.
· Hide the planet computation problems after year 80608.
· Use the Qt raster engine by default. This fixes mac rendering bugs and speeds up greatly the GUI rendering.
· Improved management of intersection of viewports with large FOV and projections with singularities.
· Added Hammer-Aitoff projection allowing full sky overview.
· Fixed various bugs.
