Astronomy Buff

Stellarium Version 0.9 is Out

by Tony on June 23rd, 2007

Yay! Stellarium now works in window mode!

Thank the Gods! (sorry Andy) I just installed and started using the latest release of Stellarium and I’m doing my little happy dance.

Stellarium is a great (and free) planetarium program that I find very useful in showing me what’s up in the sky on a given night. There are lots of other programs, like Starry Night, that do the same thing, but they cost lots of money.

Stellarium has many really neat features and it seems to have been designed by someone who worked in planetaria a lot because you can use the program with a video projector and there are options for projecting onto a spherical surface.

Anyway, there were some problems with the older version I was using on my MacBook Pro that wouldn’t allow me to use the windowing mode, all I could do was use it in full screen mode.

This wouldn’t have been a problem except I wanted to use Stellarium to make little videos using SnapzPro X to record little presentations and post them on YouTube. SnapzPro X has this feature to allow recording of things on your screen in QT format, but I couldn’t make it work when Stellarium was in full screen mode.

Now, they seem to have worked that out and I’m in the process of making a little video about the conjunction of Saturn and Venus on June 30th. This is great! Very good work guys.

I made the little screenshot above effortlessly with SnapzPro X, what a relief.

If you’re interested in learning about the sky and seeing what’s up, I highly recommend downloading this program. It’s free and very easy to use. I’m going to make a panorama of Boulder to use in my version.

Technorati Tags: night sky, observing, Saturn Venus Conjunctio, stellarium

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POSTED IN: observing the night sky