Extending the Stellarium virtual planetarium
The Stellarium planetarium program shows a realistic sky in 3D, calculates and displays star movements, and lets you prepare and evaluate observations. A previous article [1] introduced the software and looked at some of its capabilities. In this article, I focus on extending the software with plugins, additional materials, and little-known features.
Installation
Most distributions offer Stellarium version 0.13.3 in their repositories, which is the version I discuss here. Version 0.14.2 was released January 2016 [2]. You can install the program on newer computers without problem; however, it isn't possible on older systems if they don't support OpenGL 2.1 or later. Your only recourse then is to install the legacy program, version 0.9.
The directories for the program's files are based on the Linux standard: The data resides in /usr/share/stellarium/, and you should not change the data in this directory or its subdirectories. Only on rare occasions with a compelling need should you access this directory with root privileges. The program stores userspace data below ~/.stellarium/. Naturally this directory is empty immediately after the installation.
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