#Stellarium astronomy software software

Therefore, it was with great pleasure that I recently rediscovered the software version of this experience. We had an understanding that during these quiet moments only the stars counted and nothing else was said. My father loved to tell me stories of the Greeks and the Romans and relate them to the patterns above. Cold nights were perfect for viewing the stars.

When I was five or six my father used to walk with me on cold winter nights from my house at the top of a country hill to the bottom where my sports club existed. Why am I writing this? This is an article based on a remembrance of my father and reinforced by the brilliance of modern well-written open source Astronomy software. Figure 2: Celestia’s view of Earth via the software’s default dataset Memories Both Stellarium and Celestia have a supportive community of developers and their project homepages reside on Sourceforge.

You may tour the solar system or with the help of extra datasets discover the scale of the known Universe. Stellarium is one of the highest quality products in the market placeĬelestia is a real time 3D space simulation using open GL graphics (figure 2) and a plug in infrastructure, this software delivers an educationally valuable double punch. This is one of the highest quality products in the market place. Don’t be fooled by the software’s 0.8 version label (at the time of writing). You may even choose to view the heavens from the moon. The software is a precision tool with hairline accuracies, which places you anywhere in the world at any time. Stellarium (figure 1) is a sky renderer that marries accuracy and correctness with pure, unadulterated art. Figure 1: Stellarium with constellation art rendered And, if not, at least your eyes will feast upon some delicious candy. You never know, you might learn something along the way. These packages are visually appealing and fun to use. I will describe the installation and use of two astronomy related software packages: Stellarium and Celestia. Being a devoted backseat observer to the evolution of the Universe in general and GNU/Linux software in specific, I thought it was time to show off what I consider to be the elite of desktop elegance. Astronomy software comes in many forms-from the details of computer intensive Grid computing of the distribution of stars (okay that’s astrophysics) to rendering the night sky in artistically detailed and sumptuous graphics.

Stellarium astronomy software