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Stellarium is a free 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.

A shooting star flashes past Jupiter. You can select different intensities in the View window.

A shooting star flashes past Jupiter. You can select different intensities in the View window.

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The great nebula in Orion. Press N to bring up the nebula labels. Also shown are constellation lines, press C to show or hide them.

The great nebula in Orion. Press N to bring up the nebula labels.

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The dance of the planets above ESO headquarters, near Munich.

The dance of the planets above ESO headquarters, near Munich.

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Full sky view of the constellations, their boundaries and the Milky Way.

Full sky view of the constellations, their boundaries and the Milky Way.

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Constellation art turned on.

Constellation art turned on.

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Click on the picture to the left for details.

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features

sky

  • default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
  • extra catalogues with more than 177 million stars
  • default catalogue of over 80,000 deep-sky objects
  • extra catalogue with more than 1 million deep-sky objects
  • asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
  • constellations for 40+ different cultures
  • calendars of 35+ different cultures
  • images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
  • realistic Milky Way
  • very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
  • the planets and their satellites
  • all-sky surveys (DSS, HiPS)

interface

  • a powerful zoom feature
  • time control
  • multilingual interface
  • scripting interface
  • fisheye projection for planetarium domes
  • spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome
  • graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
  • HTTP interface (web-based control, remote control API)
  • telescope control

visualisation

  • several coordinate grids
  • precession circles
  • star twinkling
  • shooting stars
  • tails of comets
  • eclipse simulation
  • supernovae and novae simulation
  • exoplanet locations
  • ocular view simulation
  • 3D sceneries
  • skinnable landscapes with spheric panorama projection

customisability

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

presentations

news

system requirements

minimal

  • Linux/Unix; Windows 7 and above; macOS 11.0 and above
  • 3D graphics card which supports OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL 1.3 or OpenGL ES 2.0
  • 512 MB RAM
  • 600 MiB on disk
  • Keyboard
  • Mouse, Touchpad or similar pointing device

recommended

  • 64-bit operating system
  • Linux/Unix; Windows 10 and above; macOS 11.0 and above
  • 3D graphics card which supports OpenGL 3.3 and above
  • 1 GiB RAM or more
  • 1.5 GiB on disk
  • Keyboard
  • Mouse, Touchpad or similar pointing device
  • Moderately dark environment (deep shadow or indoors)

developers

Project coordinator: Fabien Chéreau
Graphic designer: Martín Bernardi
Developers: Alexander V. Wolf, Georg Zotti, Guillaume Chéreau, Ruslan Kabatsayev, Worachate Boonplod
Sky cultures researcher: Susanne M. Hoffmann
Collaborators: Jocelyn Girod and everyone else in the community.

financial support

Many individuals and organisations are supporting the development of Stellarium by donations, and the most generous financial contributors (with donations of $250 or more) are Laurence Holt, Astronomie-Werkstatt "Sterne ohne Grenzen", John Bellora, Jeff Moe (Spacecruft), BairesDev, Vernon Hermsen, Triplebyte, Marla Pinaire, Satish Mallesh, Vlad Magdalin, Philippe Renoux, Fito Martin.

silver sponsors

BairesDev logo
dotcom-monitor logo

social media

get involved

You can learn more about Stellarium, get support and help the project via these links:

acknowledgment

If the Stellarium planetarium was helpful for your research work, please cite the following paper in your acknowledgment:

This research has made use of the Stellarium planetarium

  • Zotti, G., Hoffmann, S. M., Wolf, A., Chéreau, F., & Chéreau, G. (2021). The Simulated Sky: Stellarium for Cultural Astronomy Research. Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, 6(2), 221–258. DOI: 10.1558/jsa.17822

Or you may download the BibTeX file of the paper to create another citation format.

Please note that the software has several releases since these fundamentals were published:

  • Stellarium contributors (2024). Stellarium v24.3 Astronomy Software. URL https://stellarium.org/. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13825639
  • Zotti, G., Wolf, A. (2022). Stellarium: Finally at Version 1.0! And Beyond. Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, 8(2), 332–334. DOI: 10.1558/jsa.25608

git

The latest development snapshot of Stellarium is kept on github. If you want to compile development versions of Stellarium, this is the place to get the source code.

books

Documentation and description of the sky cultures, state March 2022, plus a lot of additional research:

supporters and friends

Stellarium is produced by the efforts of the developer team, with the help and support of the following people and organisations .

langlinks