5 reasons to try Stellarium, the free planetarium
TOOLS. A look at my favorite target-finder.
If you have a smart telescope, you may feel like the star atlas that came with it has you covered as far as finding your way around the sky. These apps are generally awesome in their own ways, and make locating and then pointing your scope at many popular objects almost unbelievably easy. But – and this is a big BUT if you’re interested in more adventure – they tend to come with fairly limited catalogs of objects. If you want to wander any distance from the well-worn path, let alone dance among far-flung starfields, you’re also going to need a better map.
My personal favorite choice for that map is Stellarium. Not as a replacement for my Seestar’s app but as a complement to it. With a default catalog of over 600,000 stars and extra catalogs covering more than 177 million, plus a standard 80,000 deep-sky objects, upgradeable to 1 million, it’s extremely comprehensive. And if that weren’t already enough, you can extend Stellarium’s database yourself as astronomers discover new objects, with easy built-in tools.
Here are 5 great reasons why you should try Stellarium today:
1. Find it!
If it’s in the sky, Stellarium should be able to help you locate it. And that goes not just for famous targets like those in the Messier Catalog, but also for the more obscure celestial wallflowers out there.
For example in Asteroid alert I show how Vesta, a prominent asteroid, is not currently listed in Seestar’s SkyAtlas search, and how I find it using Stellarium. For any object, Stellarium lists its coordinates in several of the most popular formats, like RA/Dec and Az/Alt. Punch these into your smart telescope app and you’re off and running!
2. Confirm its visibility
While you may know that a particular object is in the night sky during the current season, when does it actually rise and when does it set? Will it be visible during the two hour period you’re planning to look tonight? If not, when will it be? Will you be able to see it from your balcony or backyard, which has a view to the east but not west? Many objects are best looked at when they’re higher in the sky, to minimize atmospheric interference – how high will your target be when you’re planning to look? While many of these things are technically possible to work out with your smart telescope’s app, I’ve at least found Stellarium to be very easy to use for this purpose, thanks to handy tools to move forward/backward in time, zoom in and out and navigate around the sky, plus understand what part of the sky I’m looking at.
3. Discover your own targets of interest
Smart telescope apps offer lots of features for recommending potential targets, but Stellarium’s ‘Astronomical Calculations’ window lets you take your search to a whole ‘nother level. For any given time, filter by things like object type and magnitude, and Stellarium curates a list of matching available objects from its vast database. Select an object from the list to jump to its position in the sky.
4. Always up-to-date
If for whatever reason a target is not yet loaded into Stellarium’s database – maybe you’re excited to check out a newly-discovered comet or asteroid – the app offers tools for loading the missing object directly from the Minor Planet Center, the International Astronomical Union’s central global clearinghouse.
5. Give the sky some room to breathe
The sky is big. Really big. I love the ease and portability of my smart telescope mobile app, but the smaller screen does sometimes feel limiting – for example when I’m trying to get a sense of where one object sits in the sky in relation to another like, say, a constellation. Even on tablet it can all get a bit cramped. Being desktop-based, Stellarium lets you explore the sky on a much larger screen, taking in wider swaths in one view. The bigger picture makes it easier to grasp the… er… bigger picture.
6. (Bonus reason!) It’s FREE!
Stellarium is available for free download for Windows, Mac, or Linux at stellarium.org. There’s also a free web-based version and mobile app. Of course, if you like Stellarium enough, you can always choose to make a voluntary contribution to support their awesome team.