Stellarium - A must for every astronomy lover

Have you been ever interested in gazing at the cloudless night sky? Wondering what is out there? Or wondering what kind of a night sky would there be other planets? Well you don’t have to wonder or imagine anymore. There is free planetarium software which creates them all very realistically in your computer monitor.

This freeware is called Stellarium. By this planetarium software you can watch any sky at any time at anywhere on any major solar system body in your computer monitor screen. This view is actually a 3D realistic view. You would feel like watching cloudless clear sky by standing on a ground.  You can use your mouse to turn around just like playing a 3D PC game. And scroll the mouse to zoom in and out.Here are some screenshots of its view.

If you move the mouse pointer to the left hand side and bottom side you can see option panels as in the above screenshots.You can hide these panels if you want. Here you can set your location and time for the sky and search for objects in the left side panel. When selecting other planets to see their skies, remember to choose a suitable landscape given like Moon, Mars and Saturn to get a realistic view. You can select them by ‘Sky and viewing options window’ in the left hand side panel.

You will have to assume a clear sky in all the planets which has an atmosphere even though how cloudy or unclear it can be. Remember to turn off the atmospheric effect in the bottom side panel for locations instead of the skies of the Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Titan, Uranus and Neptune. You could eye witness how strange a sky can be without an atmosphere.  Here you can enjoy spectacular and wonderful views of the planets from different skies. Here are the most spectacular views I got. I wish I could really experience these nights.

A view of Saturn from moon hyperion

A view of Saturn from moon Mimas

 Jupiter rising from moon Metis

A view of Uranus from moon Mimas

A view of Mars from moon Phobos

A spectacular view of Saturnian sky

If you enjoy watching stars, constellations, nebulas, star clusters,  and galaxies with a equatorial grid, Azimuthal grid and meridian all that this is the ideal software for you. You can view constellations according to western, Egyptian, Aztec or Chinese depictions clearly detailed by switching through ‘Star lore’ in ‘Sky and viewing options window’. When you select any object in the sky you can get almost every astronomical detail about it in the upper left side. Also you can have a powerful zoom on them and watch them as if you see them through a telescope.  Another cool thing is that you can study the motion of the stars and planets by increasing or decreasing the time rate. Cool! Isn’t it? You can adjust them all by using bottom side panel.

View of star constellations

Constellations with equatorial grid

With an active internet connection and ‘Satellite Hints’ selected in the bottom side panel you can view the actual positions and visibility of the artificial satellites orbiting the Earth. The orbits of major orbiters like ISS (International Space Station), HST (Hubble Space Telescope) and other major satellites will be clearly marked in the sky.

HST with orbital path live in the night sky

In the configuration window you can see plugins for databases of pulsars, quasars, supernovas, exoplanets, angle measures and all that. There are some scripts of solar eclipse, lunar eclipse, and other astronomical events which can be played as video by Stellarium. Also there are star catalogues which can be downloaded to enhance the star visibility. Hence this freeware is a must for anyone who is interested or curious in astronomy. 

So why don’t you try. To download and for more information visit http://www.stellarium.org/