Stellarium is an open-source planetarium software which renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time displaying stars, constellations, planets, nebulae and more. Stellarium is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 and is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Stellarium provides a real-time view of what the sky looks like from anywhere on earth. Users can fast forward the time to track the movement of stars and other objects across the sky. There is a zoom option available to simulate using a telescope or binoculars.
The free software offers a built-in catalogue of more than 600,000 stars and provides the ability to download additional catalogues of over 170 million stars. A plugin is available to provide telescope control.
The community behind the software has announced 0.20.1 has been released. Highlights of the release include restore working Stellarium in ANGLE mode on Window, many changes in scripting engine and Script Console, fixes in GUI and plugins and an updated DSO catalog.
The latest development snapshot of Stellarium is hosted on GitHub. If you want to compile development versions of Stellarium you can get the source code here.
You can learn more on what’s available in the latest version release here.
Another interesting recent astronomy software release is AstroInfo, which is a new astronomy web application which offers useful information and calculations that can help amateur astronomers in planning their astronomy/astrophotograpy sessions.
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