Stellarium
The Stellarium Dev Team - (Open Source)
Description
Stellarium provides you with accurate data about the night sky, which can be used by professional and amateur astronomers alike. Basically it's a planetarium for your computer. The application shows a realistic sky in 3D; the same as what you'd see with a telescope.
Key features include:
- Default catalog of over 600,000 stars (extra catalogs with more than 210 million stars).
- Asterisms and illustrations of the constellations.
- Constellations for 20+ different cultures.
- Images of nebulae (full Messier catalog).
- The planets and their satellites.
- Very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset.
- Realistic Milky Way.
Stellarium has a great looking interface that can be accessed by all levels of user. It comes with a powerful zoom feature, time control, fish-eye projection for planetarium domes, extensive keyboard control and telescope control. Stellarium also comes with plugin control, so you can add functions like artificial satellites, ocular simulation, and telescope configuration. You can also add to your database, new solar system objects from online resources.
