Stellarium - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Stellarium is a free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

planetarium

Planetarium

A planetarium is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation...

, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

, available for Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

and Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

. It uses OpenGL

OpenGL

OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...

to render a realistic sky

Sky

The sky is the part of the atmosphere or outer space visible from the surface of any astronomical object. It is difficult to define precisely for several reasons. During daylight, the sky of Earth has the appearance of a pale blue surface because the air scatters the sunlight. The sky is sometimes...

in real time

Real-time computer graphics

Real-time computer graphics is the subfield of computer graphics focused on producing and analyzing images in real time. The term is most often used in reference to interactive 3D computer graphics, typically using a GPU, with video games the most noticeable users...

.

Stellarium was developed by the French programmer Fabien Chéreau

Fabien Chéreau

Fabien Chéreau is a French Research Engineer and computer programmer best known for authoring the planetarium software Stellarium, a free, open source astronomy software package which renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time.He previously worked as a Research Engineer at the Paris...

, who launched the project in the summer of 2001. Other developers include Robert Spearman, Johannes Gajdosik, Matthew Gates, Nigel Kerr and Johan Meuris, who is responsible for the artwork.

Stellarium was featured on SourceForge

SourceForge

SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...

in May 2006 as Project of the Month.

History

In 2006, Stellarium 0.7.1 won a gold award in the Education category of the Les Trophées du Libre

Les Trophées du Libre

Les Trophées du Libre contest is a free software contest whose goal is to promote innovative software projects and give these projects recognition and media coverage - recently also to motivate students and academic institutions with special prizes. The competition is international and it is...

free software

Free software

competition.

Sky features

Over 600,000 star
Star
A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...

s from the Hipparcos Catalogue and the Tycho-2 Catalogue
Tycho-2 Catalogue
The Tycho-2 Catalogue is a catalogue of more than 2.5 million of the brightest stars.- Catalogue :The astrometric reference catalogue contain positions, proper motions, and two-color photometric data for the 2,539,913 of the brightest stars in the Milky Way, of which about 5000 are visible to the...
Extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
Asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
Constellations
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal of critical and democratic theory and successor of Praxis International. It is edited by Andrew Arato, Amy Allen, and Andreas Kalyvas...
Constellations from ten cultures
Images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
Realistic Milky Way
Milky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky...
Realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
Planet
Planet
A planet is a celestial body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals.The term planet is ancient, with ties to history, science,...

s of the solar system
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...

and their major moon
Natural satellite
A natural satellite or moon is a celestial body that orbits a planet or smaller body, which is called its primary. The two terms are used synonymously for non-artificial satellites of planets, of dwarf planets, and of minor planets....

s
Ability to display stars and other celestial objects as seen from reference points other than the Earth (e.g. Saturn
Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Saturn is named after the Roman god Saturn, equated to the Greek Cronus , the Babylonian Ninurta and the Hindu Shani. Saturn's astronomical symbol represents the Roman god's sickle.Saturn,...

, Phobos
Phobos (moon)
Phobos is the larger and closer of the two natural satellites of Mars. Both moons were discovered in 1877. With a mean radius of , Phobos is 7.24 times as massive as Deimos...

, comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) or any other object defined in ssystem.ini)

Interface

Zoom
Time control
Multilingual interface
Scripting to record and playback shows
Fisheye projection for planetarium
Planetarium
A planetarium is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation...

domes
Spheric mirror projection for personal domes
Graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
Telescope control

Visualization

Equatorial and azimuthal grids
Star twinkling
Shooting stars
Eclipse simulation
Skinnable landscapes
Spherical panorama projection

Customisability

Deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts etc can be added.

Planetarium Dome Projection

The fisheye and spherical mirror distortion features allow Stellarium to be projected onto domes. Spherical mirror distortion is used in projection systems that utilize a digital video projector

Video projector

A video projector is an image projector that receives a video signal and projects the corresponding image on a projection screen using a lens system. All video projectors use a very bright light to project the image, and most modern ones can correct any curves, blurriness, and other...

and a first surface convex spherical mirror to project images onto a dome

Dome

A dome is a structural element of architecture that resembles the hollow upper half of a sphere. Dome structures made of various materials have a long architectural lineage extending into prehistory....

. Such systems are generally cheaper than traditional planetarium projector

Planetarium projector

A planetarium projector is a device used to project images of celestial objects onto the dome in a planetarium.The first modern planetarium projectors were designed and built by the Carl Zeiss Jena company in Germany between 1923 and 1925, and have since grown more complex. Smaller projectors...

s and fish-eye lens projectors and for that reason are used in budget and home planetarium setups where projection quality is less important. Several companies that build and sell digital planetarium systems use Stellarium, such as e-Planetarium. However, Digitalis Education Solutions, which helped develop Stellarium, created and now uses a fork called Nightshade which is specifically tailored to planetarium use.

VirGO

VirGO is a Stellarium plugin, a visual browser for the European Southern Observatory

European Southern Observatory

The European Southern Observatory is an intergovernmental research organisation for astronomy, supported by fifteen countries...

(ESO) Science Archive Facility that allows astronomers to browse professional astronomical data.

Stellarium for Java

Stellarium for Java is a Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

fork

Fork (software development)

In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a legal copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software...

or port

Porting

In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed...

of Stellarium, maintained by an independent team of developers, led by Jerome Beau. As of October 2010, the project is still in beta testing, and the last commit in the CVS repository was made in November 2009.

Release history

Version	Release date	Significant changes
0.6.0	May 2004	First stable version to be released on SourceForge.net.
0.6.1	October 2004	Introduced the constellation art of Johan Meuris.
0.7.0	September 2005	Scripting Scripting language A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the... and mouse navigation were introduced.
0.7.1	February 2006	Bug fixes for version 0.7.0.
0.8.0	May 2006	Introduced features include constellation boundaries, multilingual interface (using gettext Gettext In computing, gettext is an internationalization and localization system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems. The most commonly-used implementation of gettext is GNU gettext, released by the GNU Project in 1995.- History :gettext was originally... and Launchpad Launchpad (website) Launchpad is a web application and website that allow users to develop and maintain software, particularly free software. Launchpad is developed and maintained by Canonical Ltd.... ), output distortion for dome projection with a spherical mirror and home planet selection.
0.8.1	June 2006	Bug fixes for version 0.8.0. Introduced telescope control, using an external server program.
0.8.2	October 2006	Bug fixes for version 0.8.1.
0.9.0	April 2007	Star catalogs were expanded with data from the Hipparcos Catalogue, the Tycho-2 Catalogue Tycho-2 Catalogue The Tycho-2 Catalogue is a catalogue of more than 2.5 million of the brightest stars.- Catalogue :The astrometric reference catalogue contain positions, proper motions, and two-color photometric data for the 2,539,913 of the brightest stars in the Milky Way, of which about 5000 are visible to the... and the Naval Observatory Merged Astrometric Dataset (NOMAD). Start of the transition from SDL Simple DirectMedia Layer Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform, free and open source multimedia library written in C that presents a simple interface to various platforms' graphics, sound, and input devices.... to Qt Qt (toolkit) Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface , and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as command-line tools and consoles for servers... .
0.9.1	February 2008	Bug fixes for version 0.9.0.
0.10.0	September 2008	A beta version that introduced a new GUI Gui Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally... , but lacked scripting support as the engine was being recoded for the next release. SDL is no longer supported.
0.10.1	February 2009	Introduced a new scripting language based on ECMAScript ECMAScript ECMAScript is the scripting language standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used for client-side scripting on the web, in the form of several well-known dialects such as JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript.- History :JavaScript... and GUI features for downloading star catalog updates.
0.10.2	March 2009	Based on Qt version 4.5.
0.10.3	January 2010	Based on Qt version 4.6.x.
0.10.4	February 2010	Bug fixes for version 0.10.3.
0.10.5	June 2010	Bug fixes for version 0.10.4.
0.10.6	December 2010	Bug fixes for version 0.10.5, new solar system editor, time zone override, landscape zip installer.
0.11.0	July 2011	Refraction of the atmosphere in the visualization of the sky. Redesigned search tool. The oculars plugin was rewritten and expanded. A new plugin was added for historical supernovae.
0.11.1	November 2011	Incorporates 20 bug fixes, plus improved usability.
1.0.0

Colour	Meaning
Red	Release no longer supported
Green	Release still supported
Blue	Future release

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.