Whether it’s the Southern Cross over Australia, the meeting of Jupiter and Saturn in the year minus six or the next encounter of the full moon with Mars: the programs show what is happening in the sky. The best free planetarium program is Stellarium, which Fabien Chéreau started more than twenty years ago. The astronomy-loving programmer has also worked on the software for ESA’s Gaia satellite.
The representation of the starry sky is extremely realistic – with horizon haze, magnificent sunrises and sunsets, shooting stars and much more. Stellarium shows the dance of the moons of Jupiter as well as the constellations of different cultures. As sky fans continue to develop new elements, the program is constantly becoming more diverse.
Time travel to the future or past
The 300 megabyte standard version shows more than 600,000 stars and countless star clusters, nebulae and galaxies. Additional catalogs increase the number of stars to over 150 million. To create a correct sky view from this amount of data, only some very simple trigonometric calculations are necessary.
The program enables long journeys in time into the future or past. But the same applies to Stellarium as to any planetarium software: as beautiful as the view on the monitor is – nothing beats the real starry sky.