Projects

Stellarium

Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time with OpenGL. It displays stars, constellations, planets and nebulae, and has many other features including multiple panoramic landscapes, fog, light pollution simulation and a built-in scripting engine. Stellarium comes with a star ... [More] catalogue of about 600 thousand stars and it is possible to download extra catalogues with up to 210 million stars. Stellarium has multiple sky cultures - see the constellations from the traditions of Polynesian, Inuit, Navajo, Korean, Lakota, Egyptian and Chinese astronomers, as well as the traditional Western constellations. It is also possible to visit other planets in the solar system - see what the sky looked like to the Apollo astronauts, or what the rings of Saturn looks like from Titan. [Less]

Celestia

Celestia is an OpenGL-based 3D space simulation for Unix and Win32 that lets you travel through the solar system, to the stars, and even beyond the galaxy. Visit over 100,000 stars, 100 solar system bodies, and all known extrasolar planets.

Gravit

Gravit is a gravity simulator which runs under Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It's released under the GNU General Public License which makes it free. It uses Newtonian physics using the Barnes-Hut N-body algorithm. Although the main goal of Gravit is to be as accurate as possible, it also creates ... [More] beautiful looking gravity patterns. It records the history of each particle so it can animate and display a path of its travels. At any stage you can rotate your view in 3D and zoom in and out. Gravit uses OpenGL with Lua, SDL, SDL_ttf and SDL_image. [Less]

Nightshade Astronomy Simulator

Nightshade is free, open source astronomy simulation and visualization software for teaching and exploring astronomy, Earth science, and related topics. Nightshade is a fork of the award-winning Stellarium software, but tailored for planetarium and educator use. The emphasis is on usability ... [More] , realism, feature stability, and performance. It is backward compatible with scripts for Stellarium 0.8.2 and earlier using the StratoScriptTM language developed and maintained by Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc. It is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OSX, and other platforms. [Less]