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.
Click on the picture to the left for details.
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
- 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
- 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
visualisation
- several coordinate grids
- precession circles
- star twinkling
- shooting stars
- tails of comets
- eclipse simulation
- supernovae and novae simulation
- exoplanet locations
- 3D sceneries
- skinnable landscapes with spheric panorama projection
customizability
- plugin system adding artifical satellites, ocular simulation, telescope control and more
- ability to add new solar system objects from online resources...
- add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts...
news
- Stellarium v0.21.3 released
- Stellarium v0.21.2 released
- Stellarium v0.21.1 released
- Stellarium v0.21.0 has been released!
- Presentation of Stellarium for the China-VO
- Stellarium v0.20.4 has been released!
- Presentation of Stellarium at IAUS367
- Stellarium v0.20.3 has been released!
- Stellarium v0.20.2 has been released!
- Stellarium v0.20.1 has been released!
system requirements
minimal
- Linux/Unix; Windows 7 and above; Mac OS X 10.12.0 and above
- 3D graphics card which supports OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.3 or OpenGL ES 2.0
- 512 MiB RAM
- 500 MiB on disk
- Keyboard
- Mouse, Touchpad or similar pointing device
recommended
- Linux/Unix; Windows 7 and above; Mac OS X 10.12.0 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
developers
Project coordinator: Fabien Chéreau
Graphic designer: Martín Bernardi
Developer: Alexander V. Wolf, Guillaume Chéreau, Georg Zotti
Sky cultures researcher: Susanne M. Hoffmann
Collaborator: Alexander Duytschaever
and everyone else in the community.
social media
collaborate
You can learn more about Stellarium, get support and help the project from these links:
- discussions
- mailing list
- wiki
- FAQ
- scripts
- landscapes
- sky cultures
- developers documentation
- scripting
- translations
- get support, report bugs, request new features
- all releases
- weekly snapshots
acknowledgment
If the Stellarium planetarium was helpful for your research work, the following acknowledgment would be appreciated:
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. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsa.17822
Or you may download the BibTeX file of the paper to create another citation format.
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.
supporters and friends
Stellarium is produced by the efforts of the developer team, with the help and support of the following people and organisations .
