Draft:Archive/2024/Stellarium

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Welcome to the Stellarium page. The page describes how to get, run and use the free program Stellarium, as well as how to find, run and design lessons for use in it.

What is Stellarium?
Stellarium is free software planetarium, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or so says Wikipedia. The program is free, fun, and a great introduction into the world of astronomy. You can use it to aid in viewing stars, or in a school setting by using a computer projector. You can view the cosmos on your own, or run user created scripts to give presentations. For more information, you can see their website, forum or wiki

How to get Stellarium
You can get Stellarium and run it on you computer in just 7 easy steps.

Step 1
Go to www.stellarium.org/

Step 2
Choose your operating system and click on the link to the right

Step 3
Click save file. Note, this should download from sourceforge.net. Be careful, .exe can be harmful (virus) if you don't know where they are from. Some school computer labs may have downloading disabled. If this is the case, ask the teacher on duty for help before downloading anything.

Step 4
In most cases, the download should be to the desktop. Find the icon named Stellarium-###.exe (###=version), and double click it.

Step 5
This should bring up an installation guide. Click next, and accept the GNU license (it doesn't cost you anything)

Step 6
Keep clicking next until you get to a button called install. Upon clicking that, it should install.

Step 7
Goto your start button and search for the new program (yes, if you have a mac, these instructions will be a bit different). Click run.

Running Scripts
Scripts are predefined...