Software Gadgets

I've always been interested in astronomy and loved to go to the college planetarium when I was a kid. I've tried a number of different software planetariums over the years, but never found one worth the asking price -- and most of the free ones were not worth the disk space. So when I saw Stellarium mentioned on Lifehacker today, I had to give it a try. Stellarium is free GPL software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL. (Most recent video cards have excellent openGL drivers, although you will probably want to update your drivers to the latest and greatest your video card vendor has.)

Here are the features listed on the Stellarium web site. If they don't mean anything to you, just go look at the screenshots. If you have any interest in the night sky, they'll be all you need to convince yourself that this 16 meg download is a must-have.

Sky

* Over 120000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue with name and info for the brightest ones.
* Planets and major satellites in real time (with position computation accurate enough for eclipse or transit simulation).
* Asterisms of the 88 constellations with their names.
* Mythological figures of the 88 constellations.
* Images of more than 70 nebulas (Orion, M31 etc..).
* Photo-realistic Milky Way.
* Star twinkling.
* Shooting Stars.

Landscape & visualization

* Skinnable landscape (ground, fog, mapping of fisheye pictures).
* Ultra fast realistic atmosphere rendering (sunsets, sunrises etc...).
* Automatic eye adaptation to sky luminance using physiologic model.
* Grids in equatorial and azimuthal coordinates.
* Equator and ecliptic coordinates lines.

Navigation & rendering

* Smooth real time intuitive navigation.
* Powerful zoom to see planets and nebulae like through a telescope.
* Equatorial and altazimuthal mount mode.
* Standard perspective and wide angle (fisheye) projection modes (perfect for a planetarium dome).
* Time control (real time and accelerated time modes).
* Graphical menu for simple use.
* Clickable stars, planets and nebulas, with information.
* Windowed and fullscreen modes.
* Full dome (180°) projection mode for planetariums.
* Text user interface for planetariums.

Rating: 5 Stars
Operating System: Windows (Linux and MacOS too)
License: Open Source (GPL)
Price: Free
Version Reviewed: 0.7.1
Web Site: http://stellarium.sourceforge.net/index.html
See Screenshots