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Software · Education & science

Stellarium

Stellarium is an astronomy program, available on Windows, macOS and Linux.

  • Completely free
  • Windows, macOS and Linux
  • Open source
  • No account

Overview

Stellarium is an astronomy program, available on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Services and protocols mentioned: IRC.

Overview written by LicitPro from the documentation published by the authors and the cited sources; we have not tried the resource ourselves.

Excerpts that establish this information
  • “Stellarium is a planetarium software that shows exactly what you see when you look up at the stars.” — official website, 10 November 2026

At a glance

All of Stellarium is free: no feature is locked behind a paid plan, and its code is open.

Its licence (GPL-2.0+) is a copyleft open source licence: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially; modified versions must keep the same licence.

Strengths

  • Open source code
  • No account needed
  • Commercial use allowed

About

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 catalogue of about 600 thousand stars and it is possible to download extra catalogues with up to 220 million stars. Stellarium has multiple sky cultures - see the constellations from the traditions of Polynesian, Inuit, Navajo, Korean, Greek and Chinese astronomers, as well as the traditional Western or official modern 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.

Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

Sources and checks

  • Facts collected from Flathub (credit card, source code, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) —
  • Facts collected from Official plan pages (pricing, licence, terms) (commercial use) —
  • Facts collected from Winget (Windows Package Manager) (credit card, account, source code, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) —
  • Facts collected from Homebrew (platforms) —
  • Facts collected from Wikidata (licence, platforms) —
  • Last technical check: 5 November 2026
  • Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

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