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ĭigitalis Education Solutions, which helped develop Stellarium, created a fork called Nightshade which was specifically tailored to planetarium use.
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Various companies which build and sell digital planetarium systems use Stellarium, such as e-Planetarium. Such systems are generally cheaper than traditional planetarium projectors and fish-eye lens projectors and for that reason are used in budget and home planetarium setups where projection quality is less important. Spherical mirror distortion is used in projection systems that use a digital video projector and a first surface convex spherical mirror to project images onto a dome. The fisheye and spherical mirror distortion features allow Stellarium to be projected onto domes. In December 2011, Stellarium was added as one of the "featured applications" in the Ubuntu Software Center. Ī modified version of Stellarium has been used by the MeerKAT project as a virtual sky display showing where the antennae of the radiotelescope are pointed.
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In 2006, Stellarium 0.7.1 won a gold award in the Education category of the Les Trophées du Libre free software competition. Stellarium was featured on SourceForge in May 2006 as Project of the Month. All versions use OpenGL to render a realistic projection of the night sky in real time. A port of Stellarium called Stellarium Mobile is available for Android, iOS, and Symbian as a paid version, being developed by Noctua Software. Stellarium is a free and open-source planetarium, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
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