Stellarium Desktop Planetarium -- Major New Release
Posted on Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 8:06 PM by Randall
A few months ago, I plugged Stellarium 0.7.1 here. It's a very nice program that turns your computer into a planetarium. Version 0.8.0 was released yesterday. It's a very nice upgrade (although it is not currently available for Mac OS X). Some of the new features include:
* multilingual interface: use Stellarium in over 20 languages
* accuracy and speed is greatly enhanced thanks to Johannes Gajdosik, who introduced Valery Lainey's L1 and MarsSat ephemeris and IMCCE ephemeris to Stellarium
* more objects from the NGC catalogue
* list of world cities: easily select your location on a map of the world
* home planet setting: select any body of the solar system as a location for your observations. See Earth from the moon, Mars from Phobos...
* spherical landscapes: you can now use easy to produce spherical landscapes in Stellarium.
* night vision mode: all menus are displayed red, for when you're using Stellarium outside, on a laptop.
* the default font is now the Bitstream Vera Truetype font, it looks cleaner and supports more characters
* constellation boundaries: the standardized boundaries between the constellations are now included in Stellarium.
* spheric mirror projection: this allows you to build your own planetarium dome, and project Stellarium on the dome with the help of a spheric mirror.
I rated version 0.7.1 a 5 star program -- and version is better yet.
Rating: 5 Stars
Operating System: Windows (Linux
available MacOS soon)
License: Open Source (GPL)
Price:
Free
Version Reviewed: 0.8.0
Web Site: http://stellarium.sourceforge.net/index.html
See
Screenshots