The latest version of Stellarium can be downloaded from Softpedia

Jul 20, 2014 14:40 GMT  ·  By

Stellarium 0.13.0, a free, open source planetarium software that displays a realistic and accurate sky in 3D, just like the one that can be seen with the naked eye, binoculars, or a telescope, has been released and is now available for download.

Despite the version number, this latest Stellarium release is actually stable. The development has been progressing very slowly, but the devs have made some very big changes over the years. In fact, this is one of the most advanced applications of its kind and, to top it all off, it’s completely free.

“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 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. Some amateur astronomy groups use it to create sky maps for describing regions of the sky in articles for newsletters and magazines,” reads the official website.

Unfortunately, Linux users have to wait for stable releases to test the new versions. The Windows platform gets all the versions (including Alphas and Betas) and its users are the first to receive any new features. To make things even worse, Linux users also have to compile any new release. Otherwise, they will have to wait until it lands in the various repositories out there and for some distros it can be a long time.

According to the changelog, a new modulated core has been added, the shadows have been refactored, normal mapping has been added, sporadic meteors and meteors now have colors, the comet Tails are now rendered, new types of landscape have been implemented, new translatable strings and textures have been implemented, a new plugin called the Equation of Time now provides solutions for Equation of Time, a new plugin called Field of View now offers shortcuts for quick changes field of view, and 58 navigational stars are now marked on the sky.

Also, a new version of the Exoplanets plugin has been added, the Compass Marks, Oculars, Historical Supernovae, Observability analysis, and Bright Novae plugins have been updated. and a large number of bug fixes and serious performance improvements have been implemented.

A complete changelog of Stellarium 0.13.0 can be found in the official announcement. The developers have also recommended that users reset all Stellarium settings. You can download Stellarium 0.13.0 right now from Softpedia.