Comments on: Stellarium is an excellent planetarium for your computer

By: Ian Musgrave

Ian Musgrave — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:07:37 +0000

#8 MikesPier Try version 10.2, it was very stable on my dodgy old computer, and should work fine on most others, it’s worth the effort. Celestia is fantatsic, but not such a good program for working out what you can see tonight.

By: uqbar

uqbar — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:17:04 +0000

Stellarium works well on Linux – I have used it on Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, and 9.10. I tried Celestia, but for reasons I no longer remember, I prefer Stellarium – it’s been quite a while since I looked at Celestia, so maybe it time for a re-visit. One minor gripe about Stellarium – when you first start it is does not ask your location, so you end up somewhere near Paris unless you change it. Changing location is not difficult, but it is less intuitive than it could be (it would be even better if it grabbed location information from my computer).

All in all, Stellarium is great for learning the night sky. I especially like the “fast forward” option on time – it really shows how the positions of objects change during the night, and in relation to the horizons. Also great for showing how the planets move in relation to the “fixed stars.”

By: Omar

Omar — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:47:21 +0000

Well, you guys keep looking up into the sky. When the Aliens come they are going to compare the Linux users and the Windows users and pick which to eat and which to allow to live and serve as sysadmins for them.

By: mikespeir

mikespeir — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:28:30 +0000

I tried Stellarium some time back. I really liked the interface, but it used to crash for me, too, especially when I messed with the clock. Had to get rid of it. I use Celestia.

By: Ian Musgrave

Ian Musgrave — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:48:29 +0000

Chanson wrote at #4

My kids love Stellarium too! I wrote about it on Rational Moms here.

And your other favourite, Celestia, is my other favourite too. I like visiting exoplanets in it. Celestia and Stellarium, free and fun.

By: Ian Musgrave

Ian Musgrave — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:42:06 +0000

Yeah, not so much windows specific, but windows is what they have, so they write software/drivers that runs under that (sure, you can always run stuff under a windows emulator under *nix using something like Wine, that's how *nix folk run the windows based SkyMap pro (the program I use for serious astronomical observing, I generate all my spotters maps with it). Registax image stacking is windows only, the various camera controllers are windows only (I prefer Vega over the others, even though Vega is somewhat dated, there now is an Ubuntu image capture system, but its not good for all webcams or astronomical cameras). And lets face it, most people use Windows and have no desire to replace it, so being aware of potential problems with a really cool planetarium program is fairly usefull. If you are a windows user and 10.3 consistently crashes on you, you can download 10.2 at http://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium/files/ its quite stable on fairly low end systems.

By: chanson

chanson — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:09:17 +0000

My kids love Stellarium too! I wrote about it on Rational Moms here.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:06:33 +0000

Seriously? People are writing Window’s specific software for amateur astronomy? You almost have to work to do that these days.

By: Ian Musgrave

Ian Musgrave — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:12:26 +0000

Except then none of the hand-rolled astronomical imaging software and obscure webcam-made-into-astronomical camera software works (and life is too short to make dual boot systems)

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:56:29 +0000

You should run it on Linux.