14 DAY TRIAL // Stellarium is an open source planetarium software that displays a realistic and accurate sky in 3D that is built for multiple platforms. The supported platforms include Linux and the developers have added a large number of features and they've also ported some of the changes to an older version.
A planetarium application is a complex piece of technology and there are very few of them. To make things even better, this is a free one and it's upgraded all the time. The devs permanently make changes and each new version is a big improvement over the previous one.
As it stands right now, there are two stable branches of Stellarium available. A number of the improvements made to the 0.13.x branch have been ported to 0.12.x. It turns out that many people are still using the old one, so it made sense to have some of the improvements backported.
Stellarium 0.13.2 is full of goodies
"The Stellarium development team after 3 months of development is proud to announce the second correcting release of Stellarium in series 0.13.x - version 0.13.2. This version contains over 70 closed bugs and includes some wishes and new nice features - like visualization of the zodiacal light and new sky cultures. Also we announce the new release for series 0.12.x - version 0.12.5 - we are backported of some features from series 0.13.x for this version," wrote the devs.
Stellarium comes with more than 600,000 solar systems by default, multiple downloadable catalogs that can add 210 million different stars, constellations for numerous cultures across the globe, the entire Messier collection of nebulae, all the solar system planets and their satellites, time control, complex simulation, and more. This is just a small fraction of what the application can do.
A complete changelog of Stellarium 0.13.2 can be found on launchpad. The developers have also recommended that users reset all Stellarium settings. You can download Stellarium 0.13.2 right now from Softpedia, even if this is just the source package.