Stellarium is a free and open-source planetarium, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version, available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. A port of Stellarium called Stellarium Mobile is available for Android, iOS, and Symbian as a paid version, being developed by Noctua Software. These have a limited functionality, lacking some features of the desktop version. All versions use OpenGL to render a realistic projection of the night sky in real time.

History

In 2006, Stellarium 0.7.1 won a gold award in the Education category of the Les Trophées du Libre free software competition.

A modified version of Stellarium has been used by the MeerKAT project as a virtual sky display showing where the antennae of the radio telescope are pointed.

In December 2011, Stellarium was added as one of the “featured applications” in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Planetarium dome projection

The fisheye and spherical mirror distortion features allow Stellarium to be projected onto domes. Spherical mirror distortion is used in projection systems that use a digital video projector and a first surface convex spherical mirror to project images onto a dome. Such systems are generally cheaper than traditional planetarium projectors and fish-eye lens projectors and for that reason are used in budget and home planetarium setups where projection quality is less important.^{[citation needed]}

Various companies which build and sell digital planetarium systems use Stellarium, such as e-Planetarium.

Digitalis Education Solutions, which helped develop Stellarium, created a fork called Nightshade which was specifically tailored to planetarium use.

VirGO

VirGO is a Stellarium plugin, a visual browser for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Science Archive Facility which allows astronomers to browse professional astronomical data. It is no longer supported or maintained; the last version was 1.4.5, dated January 15, 2010.