Stellarium



Stellarium is a free cross-platform educational program that uses OpenGL to show a realistic sky in real time. It is available in the Ubuntu Software Center. Stellarium should not be used for very high accurate calculation or ephemerids like eclipse predictions. Though it is the ideal program to prepare an observation evening with naked eye, binocular, or small telescope.

Stellarium is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Features

 * It has over 120000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue with name and infos for the brightest ones,
 * Planets in real time, with a powerful zoom mode to see them like in a  telescope,
 * Drawing of the 88 constellations with their names,
 * Drawing of more than 40 messiers objects (Orion, M31 etc..),
 * Photo realistic Milky Way,
 * Ground, fog, and landscape,
 * Clickable stars, planets and nebulas with informations,
 * Windowed and fullscreen modes.

Links

 * http://www.stellarium.org/
 * http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page