Seeing Stars with C/C++

No, I'm not annoyed with those languages, I've been looking at Stellarium, an open source planetarium software. If you know Google Sky and Microsoft Worldwide Telescope, you'll be familiar with outer space. Well Stellarium is an open source version planetarium written in C/C++. I downloaded the installer as well as the source and gave it a run and was very impressed with it. It contains a default catalog of 600,000 stars (and 210 million in other catalogs) and gives a realistic sky view in 3D. It's a planetarium in a box! It's at version 0.10.0 (not even 1.0.0) though Sourceforge lists it as mature. This version took 8 months of work with almost 1,000 commits. There are too many features to list but it's slick, fast and gets 40 frames per second on my 2 year old PC.

It's cross-platform as well with versions for Windows, Linux and Mac. The source file archive has 214 C/C++ source files, nearly 9MB in size. As always the developers are looking for more volunteers, particularly for other language versions (foreign languages not computer!) so if you want to cut your teeth with 3D OpenGL, why not take a look? This is well worth a place in the C++ code library.

• Link to C++ Code Library