Stellarium: A Planetarium for your Mac

With thousands of stars viewable to the naked eye, finding the Pleiades, or even figuring out what that bright star near the horizon is, takes a fair bit of research, unless you have a planetarium at your disposal. Until Apple unveils the iPlanetarium, I’m recommending Stellarium.

Open source app Stellarium is a planetarium for your Mac. Stellarium shows you the stars in a beautiful and fun to play with interface. The only thing that looks better is the real night sky.

From the settings dialogue you can set your location (anywhere on Earth), change the time (to see what the stars will look like later), and change the sky culture (Inuits anyone?). Moving around the sky is as easy as clicking and dragging with the mouse. The scroll wheel lets you zoom in and out.

Instead of menus, options are located along the bottom left corner and allow you to outline the constellations, show the Equatorial grid, view nebulas, search for objects, and configure a variety of custom settings.

Despite knowing nearly nothing about the stars, I was able to set Stellarium to my location and add constellation lines to help me recognize the stars that make up the constellations viewable from my location. Thanks to Stellarium, the Big Dipper will never escape me again.

Stellarium is a beautiful, versatile, and scientifically accurate program. If you’re a budding astronomer, you need it. If you have the type of friends that would be impressed if you casually pointed out Orion, then you definitely need it. Stellarium is free and you can grab it at the project’s website.