As you may know, Stellarium is an open-source planetarium application, providing a realistic and accurate sky image in 3D, as if the users were looking through a telescope.
The latest version available is Stellarium 0.13.3, which has been recently released, coming with the below changes:
- Added Scenery3D plugin: enable support 3D landscapes
- Added ArchaeoLines plugin: a tool for archaeo-/ethnoastronomical alignment studies
- Added new DSO catalogs: Barnard (B), Van den Bergh (VdB), Sharpless (Sh 2), H-α emission regions in the Southern Milky Way (RCW), Lynds’ Catalogue of Bright Nebulae (LBN), Lynds’ Catalogue of Dark Nebulae (LDN), Collinder (Cr) and Melotte (Mel)
- Added tiny visual improvements for info about comets and minor planets
- Added Hungarian translation for Aztec skyculture
- Added Russian translation for Western: H.A. Rey skyculture
- Added support of meteors for MSVC packages
- Added patch for multiscreen setups
- Added tui/tui_font_color option for change color of text user interface
Added new version of GCVS - Added implementation of polinomial approximation of time period 1620-2013 for DeltaT by M. Khalid,Mariam Sultana and Faheem Zaidi (2014)
- Added new line on the celestial sphere – opposition/conjunction longitude
- Added texture for Ceres
- Extended list of proper names for deep-sky objects
- Fixed position of Great Red Spot
- Fixed bug in planet shadow shader
- Fixed flickering Moon problem
- Fixed jittering moons
- Fixed visibility objects on distance over 50 AU.
- Updated the Spherical projection to be HiDPI aware.
- Restore unit testing for refraction and extinction. Fixed issue in unit test for DeltaT and fixed small issue for DeltaT.
- Fixed issue in core.setObserverLocation (to a new Planet travels always 1 second)
- Fixed issue for cursor, who points to a wrong position after orbit update
- Fixed ignore the Enter key for online search dialog within Solar System Editor plugin
- Fixed crash when trying to select a satellite with invalid orbit
- Check of updates has been removed
- Fixed issues in Search Tool
- Fixed code to update ConfigurationDialog size
- Behavior of JD/MJD has been refactored for Date and Time Dialog
- Avoid delaying for the telescope control slew commands over TCP
- Avoid crash when clicking ‘Lookup locations on network’ checkbox in Locations window
- Updated bookmarks for Solar System editor plug-in
- Allowing display the scope marker below the landscape
- Allow fading of the landscapes without atmosphere
- Allow change thickness of lines of the constellations
Installation instructions:
The latest versions of Stellarium are available via PPA, so installing it on Ubuntu and derivative systems is a piece of cake. Just add the PPA to your system, update the local repository index and install the stellarium package:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stellarium/stellarium-releases
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install stellarium
Optinal, to remove stellarium, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove stellarium
The installation instructions should work on Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Deepin 2014, Peppermint 6, Peppermint 5, LXLE 14.04 and Linux Lite 2.