How To Install stellarium on Ubuntu

Posted on April 1, 2023 (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )

3 minutes • 536 words

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install stellarium on Ubuntu.

What is `stellarium`

stellarium is:

Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real-time. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.

Some features:

default star catalogue with over 600 thousand stars,
information about the brightest stars (spectral type, distance, etc.),
downloadable star catalogue extensions, for up to 210 million stars,
all New General Catalogue (NGC) objects,
images of almost all Messier objects and the Milky Way,
real time positions of the planets and their satellites,
13 different cultures with their constellations,
artistic illustrations of the 88 Western constellations,
very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset,
7 panoramic landscapes (more can be made or downloaded from the website),
scripting with ECMAScript,
plug-in support: Stellarium comes with 8 plug-ins by default, including:
artificial satellites plug-in (updated from an on-line TLE database),
ocular simulation plug-in (shows how objects look like in a given ocular),
Solar System editor plug-in (imports comet and asteroid data from the MPC),
telescope control plug-in (Meade LX200 and Celestron NexStar compatible).

Stellarium should not be used for very high accurate calculation or ephemerids like eclipse predictions. However, it is the ideal program to prepare an observation evening with naked eye, binocular, or small telescope.

There are three methods to install stellarium on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install stellarium Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install stellarium using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install stellarium

Install stellarium Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install stellarium using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install stellarium

Install stellarium Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install stellarium using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install stellarium

How To Uninstall stellarium on Ubuntu

To uninstall only the stellarium package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove stellarium

Uninstall stellarium And Its Dependencies

To uninstall stellarium and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove stellarium

Remove stellarium Configurations and Data

To remove stellarium configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge stellarium

Remove stellarium configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove stellarium configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge stellarium

Dependencies

stellarium have the following dependencies:

References

stellarium website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install stellarium package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.