Many things make humans wonder. And sky is among one of them. Exploring the heavenly bodies was always a passion for man. Watching the sky is a hobby for some, if you are not the kind of person who will go out and spend a considerable time outdoors, here is a great application for you

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.

Stellarium

Features of Stellarium:

• Default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
• Extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
• Images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
• Realistic Milky Way
• Very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
• the planets and their satellites

With its powerful zoom and time control features, you will get hooked quickly. Not only that, you can record and play your own shows easily

Here are some more features:

• Spherical mirror projection for your own dome
• Graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
• Telescope control
• Equatorial and azimuthal grids
• Star twinkling
• Shooting stars
• Eclipse simulation
• Extensively skinnable landscapes, now with spherical panorama projection

Stellarum is available for: Linux , Windows, and Mac

This post was contributed by Sujith John Abraham who writes at GeekBytes You can ask him anything on this post and visit his blog for articles like this. I hope you enjoyed the post