Stellarium For Linux

Stellarium is a multi-platform, freely distributed and open source software project designed from the ground up to act as a complete and comprehensive planetarium application that includes dozens of features that cannot be found on similar products. It provides users with a realistic simulation of the sky, as well as of the sunrise and sunset.

With Stellarium, you will get access to over 600,000 stars, a realistic Milky Way, illustrations and asterisms of the constellations, and many more features that will let newcomers breathless and help the most-experienced astronomers to discover new stars and planets.

Key features include a powerful zoom, time control, a multilingual interface, fisheye projection for planetarium domes, eclipse simulation, star twinkling, shooting stars, equatorial and azimuthal grids, supernovae simulation, spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome, as well as telescope control.

The applications includes support for simulating both the solar and lunar eclipse, a sophisticated plug-in architecture that give you access to additional features and catalogues of up to 210 million stars, artificial satellites, ocular simulation and Solar System editor.

As mentioned, Stellarium is a multi-platform application. It is written in the C and C++ programming languages and supports all the mainstream operating systems, including Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.

All things considered, Stellarium is without any doubt the best open source planetarium software for GNU/Linux platforms. The fact of the matter is that it is actually the only one of its kind and does a very good.

On GNU/Linux, the application is available for download only as a source archive, which means that the user must configure and compile the source code prior to installation. Because this is unacceptable for most Linux users, we strongly recommend to install Stellarium from the default software channels of you Linux distribution.