14 DAY TRIAL // Stellarium developer Alexander Wolf has been happy to announce today, July 31, 2016, the release of the Stellarium 0.15.0 update for all supported platform, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
Stellarium remains the world's best free, open-source and cross-platform planetarium application, an astronomy program that lets users watch stars, planets, and nebulae in real time. Stellarium 0.15.0 is a massive release, ending the 0.14.x series of the software and introducing numerous internal improvements, bug fixes, and new features.
Among the best new features implemented in the major Stellarium 0.15.0 release, we can mention the brand new StelProperty system that promises to offer simpler access to internal variables and new ways of operation for the astronomy app, as well as a new plugin for planetariums and exhibitions, called Remote Control.
"We also introduce another milestone towards providing better astronomical accuracy for historical applications: experimental support of getting planetary positions from JPL DE430 and DE431 ephemerides. This feature is however not fully tested yet," says Alexander Wolf in the release announcement.
Here are the best new features of Stellarium 0.15.0
As mentioned above, Stellarium 0.15.0 is a massive release that comes with numerous improvements, but among the best new features that might interest you, we can mention the addition of new skycultures, such as Dakota, Nakota, Lakota, Ojibwe, Euahlayi, Kamilaroi, and Macedonian, updated AstroCalc tool, new Bookmarks tool, Miller Cylindrical Projection, new scripts, and new functions for the Scripting Engine.
Moreover, the star catalogs and Deep-Sky Objects (DSO) have received multiple enhancements, such as the inclusion of initial support for the Washington Double Star catalog, azimuth lines support has been implemented in the ArchaeoLines plugin to target geographic locations, and the code of various plugins has been updated. The full changelog has been added below if you want to see what bugs have been smashed.
Download Stellarium 0.15.0 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows OSes right now.