STELLARIUM: A STAR AMONGST PLANETARIUM SOFTWARE

Stellarium's astronomical object search facility.

Many people with 3G mobile phones and portable media devices such as Apple‟s iPod have been amazed at the quality of applications, especially those relating to astronomy and navigating your way around the night sky. Most of my colleagues who are not amateur astronomers have hours of fun with these planetarium "apps‟ for their devices. However, the software for computers pre-dates that for mobile devices by many years and it is much more substantial, effective and interesting.

The astronomy planetarium software genre for use by the general public dates back to the early 1990s with the release of ground- breaking programs such as Redshift. Excellent though such early software was, the applications available were limited by the technology of the era, and pale into insignificance by the plethora and quality of the substantial applications available today.

When it comes to planetarium software for both the PC and the Apple Mac there‟s a huge choice of capable programmes on offer including Imaginova‟s Starry Night in all its various incarnations, United Soft Media‟s Redshift, Sky X, SkyMap and Cartes du Ciel (Star Charts).

The bad news is that although these products come complete with bells and whistles and are used by amateur and professional astronomers alike, they‟re not free, and in their various editions can cost anything from £30 up to £200. In addition these heavyweights have unnecessarily high hardware requirements. Starry Night in its professional editions requires at least 2GB of RAM and a fast dual core processor. It also claims a massive slice of valuable hard drive space real estate.

As usual, the internet comes up trumps yet again with a highly capable free alternative, Stellarium. It is used in professional planetariums worldwide and is GPL desktop software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL graphics software. The software allows you to see what you can observe with the naked eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.