Ever looked up at the night sky and tried to identify specific celestial bodies out of the millions you can see? Stellarium is an awesome open source planetarium application available in Fedora to help you identify and track objects in the night sky. Basically, it simulates the night sky and provides labels and other tools to help you know what you are actually looking at.

Finding items in the night sky

Stellarium labels the objects in the night sky that are of interest, and provides directional labels as well to help identify the objects in the sky. There are also options to show labels for deep-sky objects and exoplanets.

Identifying constellations

Stellarium also draws lines between and labels the multiple stars that make up the constellations, and also has a mode that overlays constellation artwork over the simulated sky.

View the night sky from anywhere

You can also set the location to anywhere on Earth (or Mars, or many other bodies) where you want to simulate the night sky

Stellarium can also do a lot more, like view how Supernovae looked from earth at previous points in history, show meteor showers, identify and track satellites around earth like the International Space Station, and also follow specific bodies through the sky. Also, if you have a compatible telescope, you can use stellarium to control the positioning of your telescope.

Stellarium is available in the Official Fedora Repositories, so you can install via the Software application on Fedora Workstation, or via the command line with the command:

sudo dnf install stellarium