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What you see when you look at the sky? Where are the Sun, Moon, Planets and Stars right now? Stellarium is a software that lets you explore the sky and watch the movement of the stars.

Stellarium turns computer into virtual planetarium and display the astronomical objects realistically. Stellarium calculate the positions of the Sun and Moon, planets and stars, and draw how the sky would look to an observer depending on their location and the time. It can also draw the constellations and simulate astronomical phenomena such as meteor showers, and solar or lunar eclipses.

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. It is being used in planetarium projectors.

To set your location, simple open the configuration window, click your location on the map, or enter coordinates manually if you know your latitude and longitude, and then save. The sky will look exactly as it looks where you live when you run Stellarium. You can zoom in and out to look around the sky freely.

Stellarium features:

1. Sky

• default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
• extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
• asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
• images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
• realistic Milky Way
• very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
• the planets and their satellites

2. Interface

• a powerful zoom
• time control
• multilingual interface
• scripting to record and play your own shows
• fisheye projection for planetarium domes
• spheric mirror projection for your own dome
• graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
• telescope control

3. Visualisation

• equatorial and azimuthal grids
• star twinkling
• shooting stars
• eclipse simulation
• skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection

4. Customisability

• add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts…

Stellarium is open source software, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. You can download it free from the Download page. For more screenshots, go to http://stellarium.org/screenshots.html.