Stellarium reaches for the stars
The way things have gone this week, you'd be hard-pressed to find a mention of anything not related to Google Chrome. Now that we've gotten the obligatory nod out of the way, it turns out that cross-platform Stellarium is one of the coolest apps around.On with the show. As I mentioned, the feature set is heavenly, and this is with the program still in beta. The default catalog includes 600,000 stars, with upgrade modules that can push the count up to 210 million stars. The constellations of 10 different cultures are included, as well as illustrations and asterisms to help you visualize what the ancients saw. There's a full Messier catalog of nebulae, too. The dawn, dusk and atmosphere backgrounds were good, but not great on my monitor. They probably look better on a planetarium dome, which is why it's useful that Stellarium also includes a fish-eye view for curved surfaces.
Once I got the hang of the atypical navigation, I couldn't find much to complain about except that when you run the program for the first time it asks that you set your current location. Unless you know your exact coordinates, easy enough to look up on the Web, the mouse-over map of the world was too small to use easily.
Stellarium should appeal both to users who need something more academic and less distracting than Google or Microsoft's offerings, as well as those who have a need for an open-source planetarium. Fortunately, that could be any of us.
