Stellarium, install this planetarium from PPA in Ubuntu

In this article we are going to see a educational app that all of us who like to see the stars will make us enjoy. Stellarium 0.16 is a free open source planetarium app. This will allow us to have a realistic view of the sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, with binoculars or with a telescope.

When we look up to the sky, this planetarium will show us its default catalog. It is more than 600.000 stars. We can also add additional catalogs with millions of stars to include in our sky. The sky will give us the possibility to illustrate the constellations to locate them more easily. In addition, as is to be expected in a program of this style, it will show us the planets and their respective satellites.

En the project website recommend users to project in dark environments for greater realism. The program includes the option to put it in night mode. We can modify the colors to suit the view in these situations. With this we will achieve a better visualization for all users.

This version comes with a nice list of added features, as well as some important bug fixes. Before proceeding with the installation of Stellarium in Ubuntu, it is always interesting to take a look at some of its more interesting features.

Stellarium characteristics

Stellarium is going to offer us images of nebulae and we will show a very realistic milky way. This realistic environment is also displayed at sunrise and sunset. For a more realistic display, it allows you to simulate the effect of the atmosphere, which results in a blurring of starlight at night, and in the brightness and blue hue that covers the sky during the day.

The program you have the option to take the latitude and longitude of any location geographic. Thus being able to observe the sky in different parts of the world. The visualization is carried out in real time, or in a time of adjustable speed back and forth in time, making it possible to "observe" the sky at any time and place on Earth. It is worth highlighting the ability to read the location from a GPS device.

The program interface will offer us a powerful zoom function. We can also carry out the fisheye projection for planetarium domes. The entire interface in this version has been improved to allow the extensive keyboard control. With which you can also control the telescope.

At the time of the visualization in Stellarium this will offer us the possibility of seeing twinkling stars, shooting stars. As well you can simulate eclipses and supernovae. The program also includes non-spherical models for solar system objects such as asteroids and small moons. No detail is missing.

At the time of customization, this program will give us the possibility to add artificial satellites, telescope configuration and others. It will also give us the ability to add new solar system objects through online resources and we can add our own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images ...

Install Stellarium on Ubuntu

To install the Stellarium application we just have to follow the typical steps to install packages in our Ubuntu distribution using the corresponding PPA. As always, we open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write the following commands in it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stellarium/stellarium-releases && sudo apt update && sudo apt install stellarium

Uninstall Stellarium from Ubuntu

Uninstalling this application is as simple as installing it. We will remove the program first. Then we will delete the repository of our sources and we will end up doing an autoremove to clean up the system a bit. Therefore we open the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write in it:

sudo apt remove stellarium && sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:stellarium/stellarium-releases && sudo apt autoremove

I want to emphasize that the features presented in this article are just some of those that Stellarium will make available to users. You can check them all and more in detail from the following link.