Stellarium

Stellarium is a multi-platform, freely distributed and open source software project designed from the ground up to act as a complete and comprehensive planetarium application that includes dozens of features that cannot be found on similar products. It provides users with a realistic simulation of the sky, as well as of the sunrise and sunset.

Get instant access to over 600,000 stars

With Stellarium, you will get access to over 600,000 stars, a realistic Milky Way, illustrations and asterisms of the constellations, and many more features that will let newcomers breathless and help the most-experienced astronomers to discover new stars and planets.

Features at a glance

Key features include a powerful zoom, time control, a multilingual interface, fisheye projection for planetarium domes, eclipse simulation, star twinkling, shooting stars, equatorial and azimuthal grids, supernovae simulation, spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome, as well as telescope control.

In addition, the applications includes support for simulating both the solar and lunar eclipse, a sophisticated plug-in architecture that give you access to additional features and catalogues of up to 210 million stars, artificial satellites, ocular simulation and Solar System editor.

Supports all the mainstream operating system

As mentioned, Stellarium is a multi-platform application. It is written in the C and C++ programming languages and supports all the mainstream operating systems, including Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.

The best open source planetarium software for GNU/Linux

All things considered, Stellarium is without any doubt the best open source planetarium software for GNU/Linux platforms. The fact of the matter is that it is actually the only one of its kind and does a very good.

It’s available for download only as a source archive

On GNU/Linux, the application is available for download only as a source archive, which means that the user must configure and compile the source code prior to installation. Because this is unacceptable for most Linux users, we strongly recommend to install Stellarium from the default software channels of you Linux distribution.

What is new in this release:

• - Added Scenery3D plugin: enable support 3D landscapes
• - Added ArchaeoLines plugin: a tool for archaeo-/ethnoastronomical alignment studies
• - Added new DSO catalogs: Barnard (B), Van den Bergh (VdB), Sharpless (Sh 2), H-α emission regions in the Southern Milky Way (RCW), Lynds' Catalogue of Bright Nebulae (LBN), Lynds' Catalogue of Dark Nebulae (LDN), Collinder (Cr) and Melotte (Mel)
• - Added tiny visual improvements for info about comets and minor planets
• - Added Hungarian translation for Aztec skyculture
• - Added Russian translation for Western: H.A. Rey skyculture
• - Added support of meteors for Windows/MSVC packages
• - Added patch for multiscreen setups
• - Added tui/tui_font_color option for change color of text user interface (LP: #1421998)
• - Added new version of GCVS
• - Added implementation of polinomial approximation of time period 1620-2013 for DeltaT by M. Khalid, Mariam Sultana and Faheem Zaidi (2014); http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/480964
• - Added new line on the celestial sphere - opposition/conjunction longitude (LP: #1377606)
• - Added texture for Ceres (LP: #1271380)
• - Extended list of proper names for deep-sky objects
• - Fixed position of Great Red Spot (LP: #490019)
• - Fixed bug in planet shadow shasder (LP: #1405353)
• - Fixed flickering Moon problem (LP: #1411958)
• - Fixed jittering moons (LP: #1416824)
• - Fixed visibility objects on distance over 50 AU. (LP: #1413381)
• - Updated the Spherical projection to be HiDPI aware. (LP: #1385367)
• - Restore unit testing for refraction and extinction. Fixed issue in unit test for DeltaT and fixed small issue for DeltaT.
• - Fixed issue in core.setObserverLocation (to a new Planet travels always 1 second) (LP: #1414463)
• - Fixed issue for cursor, who points to a wrong position after orbit update (LP: #1414824)
• - Fixed ignore the Enter key for online search dialog within Solar System Editor plugin (LP: #1414814)
• - Fixed package issue for Windows XP (LP: #1414233)
• - Fixed crash when trying to select a satellite with invalid orbit (LP: #1307357)
• - Check of updates has been removed (LP: #1414451)
• - Fixed issues in Search Tool (LP: #1416830)
• - Fixed code to update ConfigurationDialog size (LP: #995107)
• - Behavior of JD/MJD has been refactored for Date and Time Dialog (LP: #1417619)
• - Avoid delaying for the telescope control slew commands over TCP (LP: #1418375)
• - Avoid crash when clicking 'Lookup locations on network' checkbox in Locations window (Debian: #779046)
• - Updated bookmarks for Solar System editor plug-in (LP: #1425626)
• - Allowing display the scope marker below the landscape (LP: #1426441)
• - Allow fading of the landscapes without atmosphere (LP: #1420741)
• - Allow change thickness of lines of the constellations (LP: #1028432)

What is new in version 0.13.2:

• This version contains over 70 closed bugs and includes some wishes and new nice features - like visualization of the zodiacal light and new sky cultures.

What is new in version 0.13.1:

• Added: Light layer for old_style landscapes
• Added: Auto-detect location via network lookup.
• Added: Seasonal rules for displaying constellations
• Added: Coordinates can be displayed as decimal degrees (LP: #1106743)
• Added: Support of multi-touch gestures on Windows 8 (LP: #1165754)
• Added: FOV on bottom bar can be displayed in DMS rather than fractional degrees (LP: #1361582)
• Added: Oculars plugins support eyepieces with permanent crosshairs (LP: #1364139)
• Added: Pointer Coordinates Plugin can displayed not only RA/Dec (J2000.0) (LP: #1365784, #1377995)
• Added: Angle Measure Plugin can measure positional angles to the horizon now (LP: #1208143)
• Added: Search tool can search position not only for RA/Dec (J2000.0) (LP: #1358706)
• Fixed: Galactic plane renamed to correct: Galactic equator (LP: #1367744)
• Fixed: Speed issues when computing lots of comets (LP: #1350418)
• Fixed: Spherical mirror distortion work correctly now (LP: #676260, #1338252)
• Fixed: Location coordinates on the bottom bar displayed correctly now (LP: #1357799)
• Fixed: Ecliptic coordinates for J2000.0 and grids diplayed correctly now (LP: #1366567, #1369166)
• Fixed: Rule for select a celestial objects (LP: #1357917)
• Fixed: Loading extra star catalogs (LP: #1329500, #1379241)
• Fixed: Creates spurious directory on startup (LP: #1357758)
• Fixed: Various GUI/rendering improvements (LP: #1380502, #1320065, #1338252, #1096050, #1376550, #1382689)
• Fixed: "missing disk in drive " (LP: #1371183)

What is new in version 0.13.0:

• New modulated core.
• Refactored shadows and introducing the normal mapping.
• Sporadic meteors and meteors has the colors now.
• Comet tails rendering.
• New types of landscapes.
• New translatable strings and new textures.
• New plugin: Equation of Time - provides solution for Equation of Time.
• New plugin: Field of View - provides shortcuts for quick changes field of view.
• New plugin: Navigational Stars - marks 58 navigational stars on the sky.
• New plugin: Pointer Coordinates - shows the coordinates of the mouse pointer.
• New plugin: Meteor Showers - provides visualization of meteor showers.
• New translatable strings and new textures.
• New version of the Satellites plugin: introduces star-like satellites and bug fixes.
• New version of the Exoplanets plugin: displaying of the potential habitable exoplanets; improvements for performance and code refactoring.
• New version of the Angle Measure plugin: displaying of the position angle.
• New version of the Quasars plugin: improvements for performance; added marker_color parameter.
• New version of the Pulsars plugin: improvements for performance; display pulsars with glitches; setting color for marker for different types of the pulsars.
• New versions of the Compass Marks, Oculars, Historical Supernovae, Observability analysis and Bright Novae plugins: bug fixing, code refactoring and improvements.

What is new in version 0.12.4:

• This release contains solution for one serious bug and an one new feature.

What is new in version 0.12.3:

• new plugin - Bright Novae;
• added intermediate value to ZHR of shooting stars between 80 and 10000 (LP: #1208106);
• fixed search tool (LP: #1208296, #1211198);
• fixed behaviour for shortkeys of few plugins (LP: #1208291);
• fixed Flamsteed designations for few Virgo stars (LP: #1222094);
• fixed saving Milky Way brightness via GUI (LP: #1220477)

What is new in version 0.12.2:

• New features: variable stars, re-packed star catalogs (Hipparcos and Tycho-2), improvements for plugins, scripting engine and search tool. New version of the Satellites plug-in (0.8.1) with features:
• automatic adding of new satellites on update from selected update sources; by default, only new naked-eye satellites are auto-added
• automatic removal of satellites if they are no longer listed in the update sources
• "user-defined" flag protecting satellites from update/removal
• satellites can be added to/removed from satellite groups from the GUI
• custom satellite groups can be defined
• the default satellite group names and satellite descriptions are translatable
• A huge thanks to our community whose contributions help to make Stellarium better!
• We updated the Solar System file and shortcuts file, so if you have an existing Stellarium installation, it is possible that you need to reset the settings after you install the new version.

What is new in version 0.12.1:

• New features: Caldwell catalog for nebulae, re-packed star catalogs (Hipparcos and Tycho-2), delta-T manager, star magnitude limit control, localization for Windows installer, updates textures of galaxies and nebulae and various small GUI changes. The release has over 30 closed bugs in the core application and plugins.
• A huge thanks to our community whose contributions help to make Stellarium better!
• We updated the configuration file and the Solar System file, so if you have an existing Stellarium installation, it is possible that you need to reset the settings after you install the new version.

What is new in version 0.12.0:

• Added:
• New plugin: Exoplanets
• New plugin: Observability analysis
• Get geometric altitude and azimuth for script engine (LP: #1010617)
• Sky image loading with altitude/azimuth coordinates (LP: #1023548)
• New hotkey for star name labels (LP: #1032989)
• Option to activate/deactivate the Nebula Background Images button via GUI (LP: #925247)
• Return to user set location and landscape (LP: #981507)
• Display degrees and minutes for FOV of CCD (LP: #998761)
• Adding all possible satellites (LP: #1006495)
• Building a Windows x64 packages (LP: #1003041, #1027607)
• Apply atmosphere effect only on bodies with atmosphere (LP: #971875)
• Fixed:
• Various Stellarium freezes and crashed (LP: #1005155, #1030913, #940638, #992267, #1033380, #951967, #1040054)
• Various plugins issues (LP: #751381, #892027, #1006134, #1040066, #1040085)
• Various issues for nebulae (LP: #1026021, #744517)
• Add/subtract one sidereal year jumps wrong amount (LP: #1006208)
• Various small issues, typos and mistakes (LP: #1022506, #1032469, #1019247, #985204)
• Various issues in Scripting Engine (LP: #1023934, #1017148, #1017154, #730180)
• Changed:
• New tab in the configuration window to control the selected object information.
• Improvement Night Vision mode
• Extend list of default scripts

What is new in version 0.11.3:

• Added:
• ecliptic grid (LP: #834307)
• world observatories to the locations list (LP: #891643)
• allow configuration of url for SIMBAD lookups (LP: #948528)
• opportunity to freely choose the object information to display (LP: #834325)
• Pluto texture (LP: #906766)
• Fixed:
• No objects under horizon (LP: #952532)
• (MinGW-w64) CMake does not detect Win64 (LP: #951465)
• (MinGW-w64) Compilation errors (LP: #951405, #951742)
• Oculars FOV (LP: #971066, #962691)
• "Galactic Plane" string does not get translated when language is switched (LP: #976515)
• Use freedesktop specification for Unity quicklists (LP: #959893)
• Apparent diameter of planets with rings (LP: #960904)
• Crash [assert] when FOV is small and Quasars or Historical Supernovae plugins is enabled (LP: #961011)
• Angle Measure plug-in reads the wrong options from the configuration file (LP: #954205)
• Crash in debug mode on displaying constellation borders (LP: #951967)
• Star halo "dances" for small Solar System objects (LP: #805810)
• RTL-languages is not displayed correctly when using gravity labels (LP: #801668)
• Orbits with close perihelions are not displayed correctly (LP: #640455)
• Precision of angular diameter lower than intended (LP: #955635)
• Moons' orbit lines broken by parent planet movement with time (LP: #889712)
• Invalid user defined location cause Stellarium to crash (LP: #860220)
• Difficulty to select zoomed in planets and moons (LP: #854374)
• Altazimutal grid not overlapping equatorial grid when located on poles (LP: #775972)
• Global key bindings not global (LP: #687288)
• Screenshot write permission fail (Vista/7) (LP: #568086)
• Wrong planet phases as seen from more outer planets (LP: #803305)
• Zoom in/out command sticks (LP: #712112)
• Importing SSOs causes some strange effects (LP: #969211)
• Not updated values of dimensions of CCD while changes telescopes (LP: #998726)
• Gravity labels rendered incorrectly (LP: #998121)
• Keyboard shortcut for subtract one sidereal year don't works (LP: #997873)