Stellarium (computer program)

Stellarium

Stellarium 0.10.1 screenshot
Original author(s)	Fabien Chéreau
Developer(s)	Stellarium development team
Initial release	2001
Stable release	0.11.1 / 4 November 2011 (2011-11-04)
Written in	C++ (Qt)
Operating system	Linux, Windows, Mac OS X
Platform	PC
Size	37.5 MB (Linux tarball) 35 MB (Debian package) 45.6 MB (Windows installer) 60.7 MB (Mac OS X package)
Type	Educational software
License	GNU GPL
Website	www.stellarium.org

Stellarium is a free software planetarium, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It uses OpenGL to render a realistic sky in real time.

Stellarium was developed by the French programmer Fabien Chéreau, who launched the project in the summer of 2001. Other developers include Robert Spearman, Johannes Gajdosik, Matthew Gates, Nigel Kerr and Johan Meuris, who is responsible for the artwork.

Stellarium was featured on SourceForge 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 free software competition.

Features

Sky features

• Over 600,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue and the Tycho-2 Catalogue
• Extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
• Asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
• Constellations from ten cultures
• Images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
• Realistic Milky Way
• Realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
• Planets of the solar system and their major moons
• Ability to display stars and other celestial objects as seen from reference points other than the Earth (e.g. Saturn, Phobos, comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) or any other object defined in ssystem.ini)

Interface

• Zoom
• Time control
• Multilingual interface
• Scripting to record and playback shows
• Fisheye projection for planetarium domes
• Spheric mirror projection for personal domes
• Graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
• Telescope control

Visualization

• Equatorial and azimuthal grids
• Star twinkling
• Shooting stars
• Eclipse simulation
• Skinnable landscapes
• Spherical panorama projection

Customisability

• Deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts etc can be added.

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 utilize a digital video projector and a first surface convex spherical mirror to project images onto a dome. Such systems are generally cheaper than traditional planetarium projectors and fish-eye lens projectors and for that reason are used in budget and home planetarium setups where projection quality is less important. Several companies that build and sell digital planetarium systems use Stellarium, such as e-Planetarium. However, Digitalis Education Solutions, which helped develop Stellarium, created and now uses a fork called Nightshade which is specifically tailored to planetarium use.

VirGO

VirGO is a Stellarium plugin, a visual browser for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Science Archive Facility that allows astronomers to browse professional astronomical data.

Stellarium for Java

Stellarium for Java is a Java fork or port of Stellarium, maintained by an independent team of developers, led by Jerome Beau. As of October 2010, the project is still in beta testing, and the last commit in the CVS repository was made in November 2009.

Release history

Version	Release date	Significant changes
0.6.0	May 2004	First stable version to be released on SourceForge.net.
0.6.1	October 2004	Introduced the constellation art of Johan Meuris.
0.7.0	September 2005	Scripting and mouse navigation were introduced.
0.7.1	February 2006	Bug fixes for version 0.7.0.
0.8.0	May 2006	Introduced features include constellation boundaries, multilingual interface (using gettext and Launchpad), output distortion for dome projection with a spherical mirror and home planet selection.
0.8.1	June 2006	Bug fixes for version 0.8.0. Introduced telescope control, using an external server program.
0.8.2	October 2006	Bug fixes for version 0.8.1.
0.9.0	April 2007	Star catalogs were expanded with data from the Hipparcos Catalogue, the Tycho-2 Catalogue and the Naval Observatory Merged Astrometric Dataset (NOMAD). Start of the transition from SDL to Qt.
0.9.1	February 2008	Bug fixes for version 0.9.0.
0.10.0	September 2008	A beta version that introduced a new GUI, but lacked scripting support as the engine was being recoded for the next release. SDL is no longer supported.
0.10.1	February 2009	Introduced a new scripting language based on ECMAScript and GUI features for downloading star catalog updates.
0.10.2	March 2009	Based on Qt version 4.5.
0.10.3	January 2010	Based on Qt version 4.6.x.
0.10.4	February 2010	Bug fixes for version 0.10.3.
0.10.5	June 2010	Bug fixes for version 0.10.4.
0.10.6	December 2010	Bug fixes for version 0.10.5, new solar system editor, time zone override, landscape zip installer.
0.11.0	July 2011	Refraction of the atmosphere in the visualization of the sky. Redesigned search tool. The oculars plugin was rewritten and expanded. A new plugin was added for historical supernovae.
0.11.1	November 2011	Incorporates 20 bug fixes, plus improved usability.
1.0.0

Colour	Meaning
Red	Release no longer supported
Green	Release still supported
Blue	Future release

Screenshots

• 

  Constellation art in version 0.6.2

• 

  Stellarium for Java (a Java fork), version 0.8.2

• 

  Version 0.8.0, interface in German

• 

  Version 0.9.0, interface in Greek

See also

• Cartes du Ciel
• Celestia
• Digital Universe Atlas
• Google Mars
• Google Moon
• Google Sky
• Hallo Northern Sky (HN Sky)
• KStars
• RedShift
• Starry Night
• TheSky
• Universe Sandbox
• WorldWide Telescope
• XEphem

External links

• Official website
• Official wiki
• User Guide
• Stellarium at SourceForge.net
• Stellarium at Freecode