14 DAY TRIAL // I've never been very interested in astronomy and perhaps I'll never be. Some curiosity is in me, but watching Discovery from time to time satisfies my limited thirst of knowledge in this field. Still, every time I come across software that maps the sky I feel a strong impulse to fire it up and check it out; unfortunately, after a few minutes I get bored and move on.
My last discovery is Stellarium and it?s the most interesting software of this kind, I've seen so far.
Space ... The Final Frontier... Explore and Enjoy...
To ?explore and enjoy? in the comfort of your home, you should probably use Stellarium. I've seen other software that lets you ?explore?, but Stellarium is the only one that makes the experience pleasant. This is because it has a very nice OpenGL interface that creates a smooth, photo realistic map of the sky.
As you can imagine, this software requires proper drivers for the graphical card because otherwise the software will run *very* slowly. There are some similar programs that aren't accelerated by OpenGL but the experience isn't nearly as good as with this one.
Probably the most important thing is the number of the stars available in Stellarium. In this version there are over 120.000 of the, gathered from the Hipparcos catalog. I don't find this to be an impressive number since I think that over 1 million stars are actually in the catalog, but it will do very well for most users of this software.
The placement of stars looks very realistic and a powerful zoom is available. The stars move and, even though the movement can't be observed from Earth, when you go deeper and deeper into the space you'll clearly see what I'm talking about. Stellarium knows what the time is in your location and is able to draw the exact map of the sky that corresponds to that time.
The planets are textured and their satellites are also available in this software. This is a very cool feature and it gets even better because more nebulae textures are available. There are over 100 textures for the nebulae and I really enjoyed zooming into some of them. I think this feature can get even better if higher resolution textures are used. I think high resolution pictures and detailed information for the planets and for the nebulae would fascinate some of the users. Regarding the stars I can say that they are well implemented because for them are used colored dots of different sizes. When you click each object in the sky it gets selected and in the left upper corner you can see some info about the name, distance and coordinates.
By default the software starts in full screen mode and with the atmosphere switched on. The atmosphere is very realistic because it supports well implemented transparency and also sunrise and sunset simulations. Since this is the main problem of observatories, I take advantage that I use this cool piece of software and turn it off to fully enjoy the simplistic beauty of space.
Stellarium is able to draw the Equatorial and the Azimuthal grid so you can orientate yourself on the map. Anybody would like to be able to locate a constellation in the sky. Now it's easy to learn to do that. In the bottom left corner of the screen you have buttons for drawing the constellations, their names and even beautiful art that can be displayed to please the eye. If you take a look in the configuration window you'll see that it gets even better because other sky cultures can be used.
Stellarium supports several types of projections so it can be used for a lot more than just the desktop computer. An advanced fisheye projection can be used in planetarium domes, a spherical mirror projection is available for those who own a dome and I can also see that a stereographic projection is available. For your own computer, a perspective projection should be used.
Last but not least, you should know that most of the operations can be done with the keyboard, though not very precisely. The most useful is definitely Ctrl+F (the good old ?find?) but it would be nice if more work would be done so this software can be used in planetariums.
The Good
The sensation of realism is great with this software. The interface looks nice and behaves well and stable with Open GL. The textures are really enjoyable. The support for scripting greatly increases versatility.
The Bad
More stars with more info are needed for the sake of completeness. Higher resolution textures would be great. An advanced control of the sky would get this software in planetariums.
The Truth
Since I'm not a fan of astronomy I rarely enjoy looking at the sky. When I look at the sky I ask myself a question. What's with the edge of the universe? Scientists say the universe is finite but that it doesn't have an edge. What's up with that?... Perhaps I should read more!
The truth is that in my case this software is the only enjoyable thing related to astronomy. Other attempts have been made but none better than Stellarium.
Check out the screenshots of Stellarium:
