Solar System Objects

Solar System objects are defined in the ssystem.ini file in the data directory. It can be extended to contain comets and asteroids. Here are a few extended ssystem.ini files which you can use. If you want just some of the bodies from one file and some from another, you will have to copy and paste the relevant sections of the various files together into your own ssystem.ini file.

Future versions of Stellarium will contain some sort of method to manage groups of extra bodies, but for now it is manual.

Lists

Description	Link	Date created	Description
Hendrik's Comet List	here	2008-02-16	This file contains a lot of the brighter comets.
Hendrik's Great Comet List	here	2008-02-17	This file contains a bunch more comets, including multiple fragments of Shoemaker-Levy 9.
Selected asteroids	here	2008-02-17 (corrected)	Some bright and/or large asteroids.
Complete MPC List	here	2008-07-01 (updated monthly)	MINOR PLANET CENTER ORBIT DATABASE (MPCORB). This file contains published orbital elements for all numbered and unnumbered multi-opposition minor planets for which it is possible to make reasonable predictions. (See the note bellow)

Notes

• ssystem.ini structure: Your ssystem.ini file must contain all bodies referenced as parent bodies of objects in your ssystem.ini file - you can't say that the moon is in orbit around Earth, and then not have an Earth body - Stellarium will crash if you do this.
• the MPC list: The current version of Stellarium is not designed to handle the complete list of objects by the Minor Planet Center. So please use this file to copy-paste your preferred objects into your own ssystem.ini file. This list is (automatically) updated regularly to reflect the quickly growing number of known dwarf planets and other small bodies of the solar system. Currently, the (unpacked) file is 140 MB (and growing), so make sure you have an editor which can handle files that large ;-)

Single objects

This section contains code describing some often requested individual objects.

Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin)

Source: This code has been created by hendrik_d, based on comet ephemerides by the IAU Minor Planet Center, and posted on the Feedback forum on 2009-01-13. The orbital elements may be slightly out of date.

[C\2007 N3 Lulin]
name = C/2007 N3 Lulin
parent = Sun
radius = 10
oblateness = 0.0
halo = false
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_TimeAtPericenter = 2454842.1414
orbit_PericenterDistance = 1.212289
orbit_Eccentricity = 0.999987
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 136.8614
orbit_AscendingNode = 338.5353
orbit_Inclination = 178.3730
lighting = false
albedo = 1
orbit_visualization_period = 10401394706.0

(This is code for Stellarium 0.10.0 and 0.10.1. For version 0.9.1, replace orbit_visualization_period with sidereal_period.)

International Space Station

At the moment, Stellarium is not designed specifically for satellite tracking. Satellites are small, (relatively) fast, and their orbits are influenced by a lot of factors, so making an accurate prediction for a satellite's position is hard. This forum thread contains a discussion on how to add the ISS to ssystem.ini:

• Feedback forum - Tracking the ISS (when copying code from the forum make sure to strip the spaces in the end of all lines)

See also

• the User's Guide
• JPL HORIZONS
• Small Bodies in Stellarium, a blog post describing how to add asteroids and comets to ssystem.ini using data from the NASA JPL Solar System Dynamics website