stellarium
Some features: - default star catalogue with over 600 thousand stars, - information about the brightest stars (spectral type, distance, etc.), - downloadable star catalogue extensions, for up to 210 million stars, - all New General Catalogue (NGC) objects, - images of almost all Messier objects and the Milky Way, - real time positions of the planets and their satellites, - 13 different cultures with their constellations, - artistic illustrations of the 88 Western constellations, - very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset, - 7 panoramic landscapes (more can be made or downloaded from the website), - scripting with ECMAScript, - plug-in support: Stellarium comes with 8 plug-ins by default, including: - artificial satellites plug-in (updated from an on-line TLE database), - ocular simulation plug-in (shows how objects look like in a given ocular), - Solar System editor plug-in (imports comet and asteroid data from the MPC), - telescope control plug-in (Meade LX200 and Celestron NexStar compatible).
Stellarium should not be used for very high accurate calculation or ephemerids like eclipse predictions. However, it is the ideal program to prepare an observation evening with naked eye, binocular, or small telescope.
Latest reviews
got some bugs, this is NOT the latest version but a development version, do not know why the Mint Repository is so out of date?
I had the same problem as Brandon T. Crashed when launched. However, after I upgraded my video Card I reinstalled it and it works great. I've been an amatuer Astronomer since the 80's and I really like this program.
действующая версия 0.22.1. Респект авторам. Собралась из исходников меньше, чем за час. 430 MB на диске. Но из исходников не все умеют. А мантейнеры спят, наверное...
I concur with CoconutSecurity that it's a great program. However, it is easy to suggest a change to the program: submit an issue on github https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/issues
It's a great program with high valued information. It's nice to spend time with learning by using Stellarium. Unfortunately, there is no suitable way to reach the developer team, because there are some translation misstakes in German. I would like to help with the translation, but can't determine how to do.
Crashed immediately on first launch. Not a great start on my ventrure into linux :(
Stellarium is an extremmely cool peice of software. If you want the newest version, I reccommend you run "sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stellarium/stellarium-releases && sudo apt update" in your terminal than update your system!
I absolutely love stellarium, have been using it since I had binoculars, and then upgraded to Celestron Powerseeker 127 and actually using it flawlessly with computer control and all with a Celestron Nexstar 8SE. Absolutely wonderful layout and interface..
The interface is terribly ugly, but the application itself is very cool and interesting.