So if you are using it during the daytime hours you might not get to see much at first. Stellarium will start up showing the sky at your current location (if available) at the current time of day with the default landscape.

You can extend Stellarium with plug-ins or from online resources and even add your own constellations. You can choose from preset skins for your viewing locations or use your own landscape skins if you like. It also offers powerful controls such as seamless zooming, different projection modes with detailed explanations, and many more advanced features.įor an enhanced viewing experience, Stellarium can toggle equatorial and azimuthal grids, star twinkling, shooting stars, eclipse simulation, and supernovae simulation. Very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset.Images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue).Constellations for 20+ different cultures.Asterisms and illustrations of the constellations.Extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars.Default catalogue of over 600,000 stars.You can set your location and any point of time, even in the past or the future, to see what the sky looked, looks, or will look like from anywhere on or off the planet.Īccording to their website, Stellarium offers Stellarium offers a very detailed map of the night sky.

Learning about the stars from the comfort of your chair Yet if you have no access to a planetarium where you live, you can have it on your computer with Stellarium, a free and open source, cross-platform planetarium software available for all major operating systems, including Linux. A planetarium is probably the best choice to learn about astronomy in a way that is both fun and educational at the same time.

Stellarium pc