Stellarium

Explore a real-time, three-dimensional sky from a desktop with Stellarium, which renders photo-realistic stars, constellations, planets, and nebulae through OpenGL. It functions as a digital planetarium for learning the night sky, planning observations, or demonstrating astronomy without relying on current weather or visibility.

The built-in catalogue contains about 600,000 stars, while additional catalogues can expand the view to as many as 210 million. Multiple panoramic landscapes, fog effects, light-pollution simulation, and a scripting engine let users recreate different viewing conditions and automate presentations. Sky cultures include Polynesian, Inuit, Navajo, Korean, Lakota, Egyptian, Chinese, and traditional Western constellation traditions. Users can also travel to other solar-system worlds, compare the sky seen by Apollo astronauts, or view Saturn’s rings from Titan.

Stellarium suits students, teachers, amateur astronomers, science presenters, and anyone exploring celestial objects from a computer. It runs on Linux, requires snapd, targets x86_64 (amd64) systems, and is open-source software published by Tanmoy Saha in the Education category. The current version is v26.2; on Wayland, a crash can be worked around with snap run stellarium-daily.stellarium -platform xcb.

A v26.2 user guide supports the desktop release, translations are available through Transifex, and a browser-based version offers another way to explore Stellarium’s sky.