14 DAY TRIAL // Alexander Wolf released today Stellarium 0.16.0, a new major update of the open-source and cross-platform planetarium software for GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, and Windows platforms.
Stellarium 0.16.0 is a stable version that introduces some exciting new features, such as a RemoteSync plugin that lets users run multiple instances of the application, supports non-spherical models for solar system objects like small moons and asteroids, and new Skycultures, including Belarusian and Hawaiian Star Lines.
There's support for the RTS2 telescope system with TLE tracking has been added in the Telescope plugin, it's now possible to read the current location from a GPS device, and the solar system configuration file was split into two parts. Moreover, the AstroCalc feature was updated as well with What's Up Tonight, graphs, and other small improvements.
Extra catalogs of uncommon galaxies have been added
Lots of other enhancements were added in Stellarium 0.16.0, and among some of the the changes that caught our eye, we can mention the addition of extra catalogs of uncommon galaxies, context support for asterism and constellation names, configurable options to AstroCalc tool including the ability to control date and time formatting settings and support for variable and double stars.
A total of 38 bugs have been closed in this major update, which is recommended to anyone using Stellarium 0.15.2 or a previous release. Please note that the new Stellarium 0.16 series is based on the Qt5.6 application framework, which many of you should have installed on your GNU/Linux distributions, but it can also be built from sources with Qt 5.4.
We've attached the full changelog below if you're curious to know every little improvement that landed in this update to the most popular astronomical observatory software, and you can download Stellarium 0.16.0 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems from our website.