Stellarium 0.8.1 review

Stellarium is an open source desktop planetarium for Mac OS X, Linux/Unix, and Windows.

License: GPL OS: Mac OS X File size: 0K Developer: The Stellarium Project Price: $0.00 Updated: 27 Jun 2006

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Stellarium is an open source desktop planetarium for Mac OS X, Linux/Unix, and Windows.

It renders the skies in realtime using OpenGL, which means the skies will look exactly like what you see with your eyes, binoculars, or a small telescope.

Stellarium is very simple to use, which is one of its biggest advantages: it can easily be used by beginners.

Its features include, over 120, stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue with name and information for the brightest ones, planets in real time, with a powerful zoom mode to see them like in a telescope, drawings of the 88 constellations with their names, grids in Equatorial and Azimuthal coordinates, time control (real time and accelerated time modes) , and clickable stars, planets and nebulas with information.

Here are some key features of "Stellarium":
Sky
Over 120 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue with name and info for the brightest ones.
Planets and major satellites in real time (with position computation accurate enough for eclipse or transit simulation).
Asterisms of the 88 constellations with their names.
Mythological figures of the 88 constellations.
Images of more than 70 nebulas (Orion, M31 etc..).
Photo-realistic Milky Way.
Star twinkling.
Shooting Stars.

Landscape & visualization
Skinnable 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.
Powerful zoom to see planets and nebulae like through a telescope.
Equatorial and altazimuthal mount mode.
Standard perspective and wide angle (fisheye) projection modes (perfect for a planetarium dome).
Time control (real time and accelerated time modes).
Graphical menu for simple use.
Clickable stars, planets and nebulas, with information.
Windowed and fullscreen modes.
Full dome (180°) projection mode for planetariums.
Text user interface for planetariums.

What's New:
radial texture for planetary rings
telescope control using external telescope server programs
minimum_fps patch by nuisance78
image flipping
Many bugs fixes, thanks to bug reporters on sf.net!

Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.2 or later
a 3D Card with support for OpenGL.