Stellarium Educational Software
I’ve been trolling the web for the last few months looking for good science educational software and websites. There are some, but not nearly as many as one would hope. Fortunately, there are more good programs now than there were last year, so there’s an upward trend. I’m sure that will continue as as the technology that supports interactive learning becomes more common.
One of the best no-cost programs I’ve found is Stellarium. It’s basically a planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like you would see with the naked eye or with a telescope. This same program is being used in planetarium projectors around the world.
Stellarium is an open source program, meaning that its source code is open and available for anyone to contribute. Often open source projects attract some of the best minds in the related field, and that’s true for Stellarium. It has been developed by the French programmer Fabien Ch�reau, with input from experts around the world. The software is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Stellarium includes:
Sky features
* over 600,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue and the Tycho-2 Catalogue
* extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
* asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
* constellations from ten cultures
* images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
* realistic Milky Way
* very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
* planets of the solar system’s and their major moons
Interface
* a powerful zoom
* time control
* multilingual interface
* scripting to record and play your own shows
* fisheye projection for planetarium domes
* spheric mirror projection for your own dome
* graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
* telescope control
Visualization
* equatorial and azimuthal grids
* star twinkling
* shooting stars
* eclipse simulation
* skinnable landscapes
* spherical panorama projection
Customisability
* add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts…
* available in more than 40 languages since version 0.8.0
This piece of science educational software is a keeper!
