Stellarium is a software project that allows people to use their home computer as a virtual planetarium. It calculates the positions of the Sun and Moon, planets and stars, and draws how the sky would look to an observer depending on their location and the time. It can also draw the constellations and simulate astronomical phenomena such as meteor showers or comets, and solar or lunar eclipses.

Stellarium may be used as an educational tool for teaching about the night sky, as an observational aid for amateur astronomers wishing to plan a night’s observing or even drive their telescopes to observing targets, or simply as a curiosity (it’s fun!). Because of the high quality of the graphics that Stellarium produces, it is used in some real planetarium projector products and museum projection setups. Some amateur astronomy groups use it to create sky maps for describing regions of the sky in articles for newsletters and magazines, and the exchangeable sky cultures feature invites its use in the field of Cultural Astronomy research and outreach.

Color images and text have been converted to grayscale. A link to a free copy of this book as a PDF may be found on stellarium.org.