Stella 2000 is the complete astronomy suite featuring full-color planetarium, an observing log and list builder, a live ephemeris, a location browser, animations, book-length reference sources, and sophisticated searches embracing planets, comets, DSOs, and more than 300,000 stars. Planetarium effects include scintillation, extinction, refraction, and precession in point-source, photo plate, and spotlight display styles, along with the complete Messier catalog in image icons.

An integrated HTML guide to the solar system and an astronomical dictionary of 1,000 terms now form part of Stella's standard feature set.

Recent updates have brought Aspects of Astronomy, the book-length tutorial covering topics such as: What are the Stars?, Choosing a Telescope, Cosmology, Dark Matter, Eclipses, The History of Astronomy, and dozens of others -- in addition to "Stella BC", a timeline slider bar allowing you to watch the dramatic effects of precession on the sky down through the millennia.

Stella also delivers atmospheric effects such as scintillation, refraction, and extinction right to your screen in realistic, spotlight, and the new photoplate sky display styles.

Scintillation? - Yes, the stars in this astronomy software even twinkle like the real stars! Subtler color gradations accurately reflect each star's true nature, and the complete Messier catalog in ImageIcons, animation modes, multiple toolbars, custom and online options, and the facility to display JPEG imagery in response to mouse-clicks on a wide range of celestial objects completes Stella's essential planetarium feature set.

Stella 2000 astronomy software sports 3 new and expanded star catalogues. A permanent level-one database, the HR Bright Star Catalogue (Hoffleit & Warren, 1991) is present in both the trial and licensed versions of the software, supplemented by a 7000 star selection from the ultra-modern ESA Hipparcos satellite sky survey.

But you can radically extend the scope of Stella's planetarium with the Hipparcos / SAO data extensions, all the way from magnitude 7.0 to those stars beyond magnitude 12 resolvable by that most popular of astronomical telescopes the 4.5" reflector.