Look at stars!

This is just a short post about an interesting piece of software I recently found: Stellarium (http://www.stellarium.org/).

I have not tried it in depth yet but it sounds promising – have a look at the feature list from the homepage:

in version 0.10.2

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
• skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection

customisability

• add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts…

The software is open source and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux – if you have experience with this program, please drop a comment down here on this site…