Stellarium is free GPL software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope. Stellarium is also used in planetariums.

Features:

Sky

• Over 120000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue with name and info

• Planets and major satellites in real time

• Asterisms of the 88 constellations with their names

• Mythological figures of the 88 constellations

• Images of more than 70 nebulas (Orion, M31 etc..).

• Photo-realistic Milky Way

• Star twinkling

• Shooting Stars

Landscape & visualization

• Skinnable landscape (ground, fog, mapping of fisheye pictures)

• Ultra fast realistic atmosphere rendering (sunsets, sunrises etc...)

• Automatic eye adaptation to sky luminance using physiologic model

• Grids in equatorial and azimuthal coordinates

• Equator and ecliptic coordinates lines

Navigation & rendering

• Smooth real time intuitive navigation

• Powerful zoom to see planets and nebulae like through a telescope

• Equatorial and altazimuthal mount mode

• Standard perspective and wide angle (fisheye) projection modes

• Time control (real time and accelerated time modes)

• Graphical menu for simple use

• Clickable stars, planets and nebulas, with information

• Windowed and fullscreen modes

• Full dome (180°) projection mode for planetariums

• Text user interface for planetariums