Stellarium — stargazing made easy

December 10th, 2007 · No Comments

One of the most frustrating things about stargazing (aside from the cold) is not being able to actually find the objects you’d like to look at. Picking an object of interest while you look at a map of the heavens in your nice, warm house is very different than finding that object when you’re freezing to death out in your back yard, trying to figure out why the stars above your house look so different than they do on your star atlas.

If you have a laptop computer and a desire to simplify your stargazing you can make your experience a lot easier with Stellarium. How? Let’s take a look.

Stellarium is a free piece of software which can display just about everything you’ll find in the night sky. Unlike a star atlas, just about everything you see in Stellarium is customizable. That lets you set up Stellarium to display exactly what you see when you look towards the heavens.

The first thing you’ll have to do when you start up Stellarium is to tell it what you current location is. Once you tell Stellarium where you are it will show you what the sky looks like from that exact vantage point. You can tell Stellarium that you have some light pollution and that you don’t want it to display any objects more faint than a certain magnitude (for instance, “+3″). You can even choose the horizon which best matches your viewing location (trees, an empty field, or even the beach), or simply take a look at what the sky would look like if there was no horizon.

Stellarium also gives you a number of options when it comes to displaying the constellations. You can toggle the star names and constellations outlines on and off, or you can opt for the full artistic effect.

Stellarium contains a complete catalog of just about every object of interest in the night sky. Clicking on an object reveals a bunch of information, including the object’s name, magnitude, exact location, and distance. You can also zoom in to get a closer look at an object. If the object happens to be a planet like Jupiter you can zoom in far enough to see the moons revolving around the planet, with their relative positions rendered in real time, looking exactly as they would look if you looked through a telescope.

You can use that same catalog to find a specific object by its name. Start typing the name of the object and Stellarium will come up with a list of possible targets. Select the target you’re interested in, click “Go”, and you’re there.

One of the more interesting features of Stellarium is its “Time Travel” feature. Remember, all of the views in Stellarium are rendered in real time, so if you watch the display long enough you can watch the stars and planets rise and set. You can also press the fast-forward and rewind button to speed things up a bit. Pressing either of those buttons a second time speeds the action up even more. Click five times and time passes at the rate of about one day every ten seconds. It’s like having your very own flux capacitor.

So the next time that you look up at the night sky and wonder what constellations you can see or you see a bright object and wonder if you’re looking at a planet or a star, grab your laptop, fire up Stellarium, and find out.