The team behind the Stellarium planetarium software has announced that Stellarium version 23.4 is now available.
Stellarium is an open-source application 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 177 million stars. A plugin is available to provide telescope control, artificial satellites, ocular simulation and more.
Stellarium planetarium also offers:
– Default catalogue of over 80,000 deep-sky objects
– Extra catalogue with more than 1 million deep-sky objects
– Asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
– Constellations for 40+ different cultures
– Calendars of 35+ different cultures
– Images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
– Realistic Milky Way
– Very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
– The planets and their satellites
– All-sky surveys (DSS, HiPS)
Highlights of the Stellarium 23.4 release include:
– New plugin: Lens Distortion Estimator (experimental)
– New sky culture: Tibetan Lunar Mansions
– Changed GUI: ability to change the look via normalStyle.css
– Added new MESA for Windows packages
– Added support Windows/ARM64 packages
– Added support the origins of nomenclature names
– Improvements in plugins and AstroCalc tools
– Improvements for performance on macOS/ARM64
You can learn more about the Stellarium 1.0 software version release here.
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