Stellarium is an open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.

It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time with OpenGL. It displays stars, constellations, planets, nebulae and others things like ground, landscape, atmosphere, etc.

Sky

• default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
• extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
• asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
• constellations for 20+ 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

Visualization

• equatorial and azimuthal grids
• star twinkling
• shooting stars
• eclipse simulation
• supernovae simulation
• skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection

Customizability

• plugin system adding artificial satellites, ocular simulation, telescope configuration and more
• ability to add new solar system objects from online resources
• add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts, and more

Other Features

• Realistic simulation of the sky, sunrise and sunset

• Default catalogue of over 600,000 stars

• Downloadable additional catalogues for up to 210 million stars

• Catalog data for all New General Catalogue (NGC) objects

• Images of almost all Messier objects and the Milky Way

• Artistic illustrations for all 88 modern constellations

• More than a dozen different cultures with their constellations

• Solar and lunar eclipse simulation

• Photorealistic landscapes (more are available on the website)

• Scripting support with ECMAScript (a few demo scripts are included)

• Extendable with plug-ins: 8 plug-ins installed by default, including:

• Artificial satellites plug-in (updated from an on-line TLE database)

• Ocular simulation plug-in (shows how objects look like in a given ocular)

• Solar System editor plug-in (imports comet and asteroid data from the MPC)

• Telescope control plug-in (Meade LX200 and Celestron NexStar compatible)