Stellarium is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

planetarium A planetarium ( planetariums or ''planetaria'') is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation. A dominant feature of most planetarium ...

, licensed under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

version 2, available for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

, and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

. A port of Stellarium called Stellarium Mobile is available for Android, iOS, and Symbian as a paid version, being developed by Noctua Software. All versions use

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve ha ...

to render a realistic projection of the

night sky The night sky is the nighttime appearance of celestial objects like stars, planets, and the Moon, which are visible in a clear sky between sunset and sunrise, when the Sun is below the horizon. Natural light sources in a night sky inc ...

in real time. Stellarium was featured on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrori ...

in May 2006 as ''Project of the Month''.

History

In 2006, Stellarium 0.7.1 won a gold award in the Education category of the

Les Trophées du Libre The ''Les Trophées du Libre'' contest was a free software contest whose goal was to promote innovative software projects by giving those projects recognition and media coverage as well as rewarding participating students and academic institutions ...

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

competition. A modified version of Stellarium has been used by the

MeerKAT MeerKAT, originally the Karoo Array Telescope, is a radio telescope consisting of 64 antennas in the Meerkat National Park, in the Northern Cape of South Africa. In 2003, South Africa submitted an expression of interest to host the Square K ...

project as a virtual sky display showing where the antennae of the radiotelescope are pointed. In December 2011, Stellarium was added as one of the "featured applications" in the

Ubuntu Software Center Ubuntu Software Center, or simply Software Center, is a discontinued high-level graphical front end for the APT/dpkg package management system. It is free software written in Python, PyGTK/ PyGObject based on GTK. The program was created for ...

Planetarium dome projection

The fisheye and spherical mirror distortion features allow Stellarium to be projected onto domes. Spherical mirror distortion is used in projection systems that use a digital

video projector A video projector is an image projector that receives a video signal and projects the corresponding image on a projection screen using a lens system. Video projectors use a very bright ultra-high-performance lamp (a special mercury arc lamp), ...

and a first surface convex

spherical mirror A curved mirror is a mirror with a curved reflecting surface. The surface may be either ''convex'' (bulging outward) or ''concave'' (recessed inward). Most curved mirrors have surfaces that are shaped like part of a sphere, but other shapes are ...

to project images onto a

dome A dome () is an architectural element similar to the hollow upper half of a sphere. There is significant overlap with the term cupola, which may also refer to a dome or a structure on top of a dome. The precise definition of a dome has been a ...

. Such systems are generally cheaper than traditional

planetarium projector A planetarium projector, also known as a star projector, is a device used to project images of celestial objects onto the dome in a planetarium. Modern planetarium projectors were first designed and built by the Carl Zeiss Jena company in Germa ...

s and

fish-eye lens A fisheye lens is an ultra wide angle lens, ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong Distortion (optics), visual distortion intended to create a wide panorama, panoramic or Sphere#Hemisphere, hemispherical image. Fisheye lenses achieve extremel ...

projectors and for that reason are used in budget and home planetarium setups where projection quality is less important. Various companies which build and sell digital planetarium systems use Stellarium, such as ''e-Planetarium''. ''Digitalis Education Solutions'', which helped develop Stellarium, created a fork called

Nightshade The Solanaceae , or nightshades, are a family of flowering plants that ranges from annual and perennial herbs to vines, lianas, epiphytes, shrubs, and trees, and includes a number of agricultural crops, medicinal plants, spices, weeds, and orna ...

which was specifically tailored to planetarium use.

VirGO

VirGO is a Stellarium plugin, a visual browser for the

European Southern Observatory The European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, commonly referred to as the European Southern Observatory (ESO), is an intergovernmental organization, intergovernmental research organisation made up of 16 mem ...

(ESO) Science Archive Facility which allows astronomers to browse professional astronomical data. It is no longer supported or maintained; the last version was 1.4.5, dated January 15, 2010.

Stellarium Mobile

Stellarium Mobile is a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca ' pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ...

of Stellarium, developed by some of the Stellarium team members. It currently targets mobile devices running

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian ...

Maemo Maemo is a software platform originally developed by Nokia, now developed by the community, for smartphones and Internet tablets. The platform comprises both the Maemo operating system and SDK. Maemo played a key role in Nokia's strategy to c ...

, Android, and

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

. Some of the mobile optimisations have been integrated into the mainline Stellarium product.

Screenshots

File:Stellarium 001.jpg, Constellation art in version 0.6.2 File:Stellarium 0.10.1 - Constellation art - English.png, Constellation art in version 0.10.1 File:Stellarium Mars.png, Mars and its moons in Stellarium 0.14 File:Stellarium Grid.png, Equatorial and Azimuthal Grids in Stellarium 0.14 File:Stellarium Night Mode.png, Screenshot of Night Mode in Stellarium 0.14

References

External links

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Stellarium Web Online Planetarium
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stellarium (software) 2001 software Cross-platform software Free astronomy software Free educational software Free software programmed in C++ Planetarium software for Linux Portable software Science software for macOS Science software for Windows Software that uses Qt