Stellarium is a free GPL software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL. Stellarium is available for Linux/Unix, MacOSX and Windows. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.

Here are some key features of "Stellarium":

Sky

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

Landscape & visualization

� Skinable 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.
� Powerfull zoom to see planet and nebula like in a telescope.
� Equatorial and altazimutal mount mode.
� Standard perspective and wide angle (fisheye) projections modes (e.g for planetarium dome).
� Time control (real time and accelered time modes).
� Graphical menu for simple utilisation.
� Clikable stars, planets and nebulas with informations.
� Windowed and fullscreen modes.
� Full dome (180�) projection mode for planetariums.
� Text user interface for planetariums.

Requirements:

� Linux/Unix, Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP or MacOSX.
� A 3D Card with a support for OpenGL. At least a Voodoo3 or a TNT2 is recommended for smooth animation.
� A dark room for realistic rendering : details like the Milky Way or star twinkling can't be seen in a bright room.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Based on Qt 4.5.
· Display constellations lines using nicely distorted arcs.
· Fixed GUI problems when creating a new location.
· Fixed the grid lines wrap around at the discontinuities in cylindrical and Mercator projection.
· Hide the planet computation problems after year 80608.
· Use the Qt raster engine by default.
· This fixes mac rendering bugs and speeds up greatly the GUI rendering.
· Improved management of intersection of viewports with large FOV and projections with singularities.
· Added Hammer-Aitoff projection allowing full sky overview.
· Fixed various bugs.