Astrarium is a free and open source desktop planetarium software for Windows.
It allows to discover night sky as seen from any point on the Earth and any date and time instant. There are many celestial objects can be observed, from eight major planets to faintest stars, asteroids and comets, deep sky objects, satellites and more; you can predict astronomical phenomenae, like phases of the Moon, planetary conjunctions and oppositions, as well as to get detailed information about object ephemerides.
Source code is available on GitHub under MIT license.
Features
* The full set of features depends on installed plugins
- Accurate positions of Sun, Moon (ELP2000/82b theory is used), eight major planets (VSOP87), and their satellites
- BSC (~10k entries), Tycho2 (~2.5M entries) and UCAC4 (~113M entries) star catalogues
- NGC/IC deep sky catalogues
- Realistic landscapes with ability to specify custom panoramic image
- Bright asteroids and comets with auto-updatable orbital elements
- Artificial satellites
- Planets, Moon and satellites are displayed according to their appearance as seen from the Earth
- Lunar and Martian surface features are displayed (in small zoom scales)
- Realtime images of the Sun
- Active Solar Region Summary view
- Detailed info about celestial objects
- Prediction of astronomical phenomenae
- Interactive maps of lunar and solar eclipses
- Atmospheric effects like light pollution, extinction and fog
- Observation planner with wide range of filters
- Jupiter moons events and GRS transit times prediction
- Meteor showers
- Ephemeris generating tool
- Motion tracks
- Field of view frames (for telescope with eyepiece/binoculars/digital cameras)
- Night mode support
- ASCOM telescope control
- Telescope control with joystick/gamepad