Cosmonium is a free and open-source 3D astronomy and space exploration application. It lets you navigate the solar system, look at planets and their moons up close, and travel to neighboring stars to get a sense of the scale of the galaxy and the Universe.
It also has partial support for procedurally generated fictional planets and stellar systems, and can load some Celestia add-ons).
Cosmonium is still under active development and has some rough edges; expect missing features and the occasional bug.
Cosmonium runs on Windows (7 or above), Linux (CentOS 5, Ubuntu 14 or above) or macOS (macOS 10.12 or above) with a graphic card supporting OpenGL 2.1 or better (OpenGL 4.5 is recommended) and at least 512MB of disk (up to 4GB if the HD and UHD textures are installed).
Download the installer or package for your platform from the download page and see the Installation page for details. The package contains only low resolution textures; see here to install the extra HD and UHD textures.
Cosmonium is written in Python and C++, and is built on top of Panda3D. To run it from a source:
Install a recent snapshot of Panda3D 1.11.x SDK
Then perform the following commands:
pip install -r requirements.txt
make build
python main.py
See the Makefile for the targets used to build packaged releases.
See in the Wiki some screenshots of the application with views of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Moon, procedural planets, ...
Simply starts cosmonium from your application menu or from the cosmonium folder. See also the installation page for more options.
Cosmonium user interface is still heavily based on Celestia, most of the command and keyboard shortcuts work the same. Go to First steps to have an explanation of the basic command or see the Control page for an exhaustive list.
The full documentation, including installation notes, controls and add-on support, is available in the Wiki.
If you run into a problem installing or running Cosmonium, please file a bug report in the issue tracker.
Cosmonium is (C) 2018-2026 Laurent Deru.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details, which you should have received along with this program. If not, request a copy from: Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330 Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.
Cosmonium uses several third-party libraries which are subject to their own licenses, see THIRD-PARTY.md for the complete list.
Cosmonium data (textures, models, orbital elements,..) come from many sources. Their respective copyright holder, license and reference are available in the info panel of the displayed object and in the related yaml file.
