The Stellarium application was developed to be 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.
Here are some key features of "Stellarium":
Basic controls :
· Look around by mousedragging, or moving your mouse against the edges of the window
· Time control: forward, backward, return to present
· Zoom
· Tabbed configuration windows
· Text user interface: minimalistic menu for use with dome projections
· Clickable world cities map to set coordinates
· Save your default location
Observation :
· All stars from the Hipparcos catalogue
· The planets of our solar system, and their natural satellites
· All Messier objects
· All NGC objects
· Planet orbits
· Cardinal points
· Azimuthal grid
· Equatorial grid
· Ecliptica
· Equator line
· Meridian line
· Moon scaling
· Object trails
· Asterisms and names of the constellations
· Constellation boundaries
· Compensation for light travel time
· Equatorial/azimuthal mount
· FOV
· Disc viewport
· Observation from another planet, and as solar system observator
Landscapes :
· Fisheye projection
· "old_style" projection, i.e. a ground texture and a number of side textures
· Spherical panorama projection
Viewing :
· Constellation art for the 88 Western constellations stemming from Greek mythology, and 11 for the Inuit sky culture
· Realistic atmosphere
· Fog near the earth's surface
· Star twinkling
· Meteor showers
· Full screen or windowed mode
· Perspective projection
· Fisheye projection
· Stereographic projection
· Spherical mirror projection
· True Type font rendering
· Frames per second display
· Frame rate limiter
· Gravity labels for use in a dome
· Light pollution simulation loosely callibrated to the Bortle Dark Sky Scale
· Eye adaptation simulation
Localization :
· Sky culture: Western, Chinese, ancient Egyptian, Polynesian
· Sky localization
· Application localization
Scripting :
· Script input window
· Script loading via text user interface
Requirements:
· A 3D openGL acceleration card and a good CPU.
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Bug fix release.
Added:
· new skyculture: Arabic - new moons and rings
· new translations for landscapes and sky cultures
· possibility to observate geo-orbiting satellites
· new cities
· misspelling on a star name
· location window: map pointer position is updated on longitude/latitude change.
· location window: fixed checking "Use as default" changing the name of the selected location to "New Location"
· Solar System Editor plug-in: a bug in the parsing of MPC lists: the epoch's Julian Day value was wrong by 0.5 JD (LP: #836839)
· Solar System Editor plug-in: crash while trying to browse for a local file
· Historical Supernovae plug-in: a bug in plug-in name
· Historical Supernovae plug-in: a bug in selected instead of nearby stars (LP: #835815)
· doesn't load localised description of skyculture/landscape if applanguage=system_default (LP: #845924)
· add/remove landscapes dialog bug in OSX 10.6.8
· horizon line setting not saved
· orbital period totally wrong for Himalia
· flag_show_fps = false & flag_sh...
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