Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time with OpenGL. It displays stars, constellations, planets, nebulas and others things like ground, landscape, atmosphere, etc.

It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

Features:

Sky:

• default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
• extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
• asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
• constellations for twelve different cultures
• images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
• realistic Milky Way
• very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
• the planets and their satellites

Interface:

• a powerful zoom
• time control
• multilingual interface
• fisheye projection for planetarium domes
• spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome
• all new graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
• telescope control

Visualisation:

• equatorial and azimuthal grids
• star twinkling
• shooting stars
• eclipse simulation
• skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection

Customisability:

• plugin system adding artifical satellites, ocular simulation, telescrope configuration and more
• add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts...

System Requirements:

• Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7; Linux/Unix; MacOS X 10.3.x or greater.
• A 3D graphics card with a support for OpenGL.
• A dark room for realistic rendering - details like the Milky Way or star twinkling can’t be seen in a bright room.
• Minimum of 256 MiB RAM, 1 GiB or more required for the largest star catalogues.