Stellarium 0.7.0
I haven't posted much in the last few days as I'm a bit busy, but I had to point out that the latest version of the fantastic Stellarium software is now available. Stellarium is mainly the work of Fabien Chéreau and is a beautiful, free, planetarium program that runs on Windows and Linux (Mac OSX soon). It displays a pretty realistic looking sky and I have taken it outside on a laptop several times to help people find stars and constellations (great artwork by Johan Meuris). It may not be the most accurate planetarium software available, but it is amongst the prettiest and improves all the time.
The new version has loads of cool enhancements, not least of which is the ability to search for objects. Amongst the other improvements: you can drag the sky with the mouse; the slewing speed has been made slower making it look less jerky; you can choose from four pre-set landscapes; there is now also a workaround to stop it using all your CPU time if you have a slower PC or laptop.
It is a 16.4MB download, but it is most definitely worth it.
Comments: Stellarium 0.7.0
Made SLOWER! Stellarium already crawls on my laptop, I press an arrow key, the go off and make coffee. It is the one substantially anoying feature on an otherwise exceedingly nice program
Posted by Ian Musgrave on Friday 16th Sep 2005 (12:55 UTC)
Great! I'll grab a copy, Thanks
Posted by Tom on Friday 16th Sep 2005 (17:42 UTC)
Ian, the laptop I'm using is 1.5GHz and Stellarium runs at about 35 frames per second without much trouble. It starts to slightly slow down when I try looking at the entire sky with all the constellation art turned on. Have you tried playing with the maximum_fps configuration setting? That should reduce the amount of CPU usage.
Posted by Stuart on Friday 16th Sep 2005 (17:44 UTC)
G'Day Stuart. No, I haven't played with the frames per second setting. At the moment I'm trying to get it to accept my location. Unlike vesrion 0.6.2, it won't save my lat long, and hand entering it into the config file only half works (it accepts lat but not long for some reason).
Posted by Ian Musgrave on Sunday 18th Sep 2005 (14:25 UTC)
Get Stellarium 0.7.1, the bug fix version. It's not faster, but it fixes the lat long bug, amongst other things. And it has a scripting language, I'm a sucker for scripts.
Posted by Ian Musgrave on Sunday 18th Sep 2005 (21:39 UTC)
hjuk
Posted by motlk on Friday 10th Mar 2006 (04:26 UTC)
Stellarium will take all it can from the CPU/GPU since the maximum_fps is set to 10000 by default. Set it down to 10 and my CPU load dropped dramatically.
I know there's more accurate software out there but this is the one I use the majority of the time especially when I'm looking for a quick glance to get myself oriented with what's up at a particular time. I also just sit there and learn the mechanics of the night sky as time progresses in fast motion.
I strongly recommend for anyone new to the night sky that wants something easy and fairly representative of what the sky really looks like.
Posted by Jeremy Young on Saturday 11th Mar 2006 (17:08 UTC)
This program is really great it is faboulas , when i'm bored i get on it.
Posted by Ruben .H. on Saturday 30th Sep 2006 (02:25 UTC)
Does anyone know how to use Stellarium in conjunction with a Meade ETX125 PE telescope so as to control the telescope with the GOTO function in Stellarium?
Rod Horton.
Posted by Rod Horton on Sunday 03rd Aug 2008 (16:34 UTC)