Stellarium is an open-source planetarium program that has gained a considerable popularity together with other free and open-source astronomical programs such as Celestia and KStars. What makes Stellarium a standout among a plethora of other contenders is its balance of features and the simplicity it offers for a novice user while maintaining a high scientific accuracy

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Most amateur science related software programs have a tendency to overwhelm users with a large number of features and detail which may put-off a casual user. Stellarium, while being a program that is designed for projection on planetarium domes, also accompanies the keen star-gazer who simply wants to find out a name of a star or the location of a deep-sky object that he wants to locate for observation.

A night and a day time rendering of the sky

Features

• Stellarium offers over 600,000 stars in its default catalogue and supports over 200 million stars in its extended catalogues.
• Photo-realistic imagery using OpenGL with a high definition zooming feature.
• Observation location settings that includes reference points outside the Earth (planets of the Solar System, asteroids and moons of Saturn and Jupiter).
• Starlore – constellations and star names from 12 different cultures including Egyptian, Aztec, Polynesian and Norse.
• An aesthetically pleasing Constellation art feature that renders a beautiful layer of graphical representations of the constellations.
• Realistic rendering of the milky-way, light pollution and atmospheric details.
• 8 different projection methods, different astronomical grids and telescope control.
• Handy features such as dynamic eye adaption, star twinkling and night mode.
• Customizable landscapes and extended time controls.
• Script support for recording and playing back tours.

Constellation Art

The high-definition zooming capability

In addition Stellarium is also multilingual, supports external plugins and has an extended set of keyboard shortcuts.

Stellarium is cross-platform with versions that support Windows and Mac OS and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. It has been a staple choice in the Science & Engineering category of the Ubuntu Software Center and is also available through SourceForge.

Reach Stellarium and find The Latest Release(0.11.0).

How to Install Stellarium in Ubuntu

If you are running Ubuntu, a Stellarium package exists in the Ubuntu repositories. It can be installed either through the Software Center, or through a terminal with the following command:

sudo apt-get install stellarium