StellAIRium – Real-Time ADS-B Aircraft Overlay for Stellarium

[kamilzaras95-cmyk]

I’ve been working on StellAIRium, a fork of Stellarium 26.1 that integrates a live ADS-B aircraft tracking overlay directly into the planetarium view. Now you can identify exactly which plane is crossing the constellation you're observing in real-time.

🚀 Key Features

Multiple Data Sources: Seamless integration with OpenSky Network, adsb.fi, and airplanes.live. Includes an automatic fallback system that switches providers if one hits a rate limit.

Dead-Reckoning: Positions are smoothly interpolated between API refreshes using great-circle kinematics. This ensures aircraft glide across your screen instead of "snapping" or jumping to new coordinates.

Deep Integration:

Click to Inspect: Selecting an aircraft opens the native Stellarium info panel, showing callsign, registration, ICAO24, altitude, speed, heading, and vertical rate.

Native Search: Use the standard Ctrl+F tool to find specific flights by callsign, registration, or ICAO24.

Visual Clarity: Features a distinct yellow selection ring to keep your target highlighted against the starfield.

🛠️ Configuration Options

Tailor the overlay to your hardware and location:

Coverage Radius: Set your tracking range from 5 km to 500 km.

Refresh Interval: Adjustable polling between 10s and 60s.

Traffic Filters: Toggle ground traffic on/off to declutter airports.

Provider Priority: Choose and reorder your preferred data sources

Link: https://github.com/kamilzaras95-cmyk/StellAirium-Windows-Standalone-

[gzotti]

We have the Planes plugin practically finished years ago and dormant in a PR because we dont have the hardware. Maybe you can integrate this or at least re-use some parts. What does it take to integrate free info sources to make it operational and ready for release?

[kamilzaras95-cmyk]

I will look on this ;)

[kamilzaras95-cmyk]

Could you send me this PR?

[10110111]

Could you send me this PR?

The other answer in this thread has already given the link: #3091.

[gzotti]

As Atque mentioned last week, #3091. It requires receiver hardware which I don't have, but else (with its single recorded transmission file) looked pretty fine. If you have found a way (discussed there) to tap those websites, this can continue. Optimally, finalized by someone who has some background and may then be available for further improvements/updates.

[Atque]

Really cool! Any chance this could be ported to Linux and MacOS?

There is a plane plugin being worked on, but it has stalled (pun intended) AFAIK: #3091

[kamilzaras95-cmyk]

#4926

It restores the built-in Planes plugin on current master and reworks it into a live aircraft plugin using online ADS-B providers instead of the older receiver/offline-oriented approach.

The current version supports adsb.fi and airplanes.live, with native Stellarium object integration, rendering, selection/info support, a configuration dialog, toolbar button, and dead reckoning between
refreshes.

It also builds on the earlier Planes work and the revival effort in #3091.

[axd1967]

ADSB data shared to the public has significant latency.

In other words, the a/c you see on your screen popping up on the horizon might in reality already be overhead.

A possible way to mitigate this is to provide an on-screen widget that allows to DR advance the a/c x seconds forward .

I'm not only a (ret'd) software engineer (despite all the denigrating comments that are regularly thrown at me here), but i was also an air traffic controller. And also a Stellarium power user. And a past contributor.

[kamilzaras95-cmyk]

Thank you for the suggestion — and for the ATC perspective, that's genuinely useful context.

The plugin already does dead reckoning between refreshes (based on track, ground speed, and vertical rate from the ADS-B feed), but you're right that it anchors from a delayed position to begin with, so the accumulated offset can be noticeable.

I've actually worked with the same ADS-B feeds in another project of mine — a transit detector at astronow.pl/pages/transit-detector.html — and in practice the latency there hasn't been severe enough to cause major issues.

That said:

• It depends heavily on the provider and the specific use case.
• For visual sky alignment in Stellarium, the tolerance is definitely tighter.

I also want to be clear about the intent — this plugin was never meant to show 1:1 real-time positions. Given the nature of public APIs, that's simply not realistic.
The goal was to give users a rough visual overview of air traffic in the sky above them.

For true real-time accuracy, the natural next step would be direct SDR receiver integration, which would bypass the API latency entirely.

I'll think about this

[gzotti]

The old Planes plugin came from the other side. ADS-B reception, predict flight path. No data without receiver. I have read that some old DVB-T receivers could be tweaked as ADS-B receivers. Mine is not on the list, which is why I also stopped with it :-(