Stellarium

[eMTe]

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

Current version: 0.10.0

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 eleven 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

* add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts...

Development team: big; check official site for info

http://stellarium.org/

[Drasir-Vel]

It feels like a really great and well made program. You can also move the viewpoint with the arrow keys and zoom with page up and down

It's exciting that you can set your location and it tells you exactly where the different planets and stars would be if you go out and look into the sky in that direction. You could look in the general direction of north, south, east or west, align the view in the program to that direction, and it would tell the names of the different stars and what is out there in that general direction.

If you live in the city, there's probably more light shining into the sky, so you can't see as much as if you were out in the country.

I wish it had a more extensive and detailed image database, instead of just the few nebula textures there are, a bit like the sky part of Google Earth where you could zoom in and get detailed texture. I tried downloading the texture packs there are, but it's not very detailed.

[Master_X]

Wait something is wrong...it isn't a game but I have it and I love it. You can download up to 9 catalogs. I downloaded the 6th and it has 2.5 million stars. Another program like this one is Celestia. It's much better than this one. I'm gonna make a thread of it if noone does it before me

[Drasir-Vel]

I did see that you could download databases of a lot more stars, but they're just entities (as far as i know), not actual real life photos of the stars, which i think would be awesome. Celestia is also really great. i like that you can navigate manually between the stars, and that you have to be really precise not to overshoot them because of the vast distances compared to the sizes of the stars.

Also, if you're into the whole space exploration thing, you should check out Noctis IV. It's this first person ambient game where you fly in your "stardrifter" and travel between stars. You can land anywhere you choose on planets. Everything is randomly generated. http://forum.curlysworldoffreeware.com/ ... php?t=2314