Celestia VS CelestiaContent

Celestia is a rare Linux app not on Flathub, but it is available from Fedora's Flatpak repo, which in theory should be usable on any distro: https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia/discussions/1988

I remember going to a planetarium at the local university while in school some 15 years ago. They told us how they use Stellarium to create the skies and Celestia (https://celestiaproject.space/) to create scripted tours for their exhibits. Both were compatible with the hemispherical projector they used.

As soon as I went home I downloaded them both and spent hours visiting random stars in Celestia and exploring the sky in Stellarium.

I think Celestia will let you do this.

Have you tried Celestia? It has several stars (at least those ones from the Hipparcos catalog) plus some galaxies (at least Messier objects): https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia

Need to link to it, otherwise folks can't find the work around: https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia/issues/1672

Upstream is on github, and seems to have their own debian/* packaging scripts, so might just be a simple upload.

Some of the data files may be non-free. The project at https://github.com/CelestiaProject/CelestiaContent states GPL 2.0, but shows some other licenses that may not be DFSG-compliant. The jessie package did split some of these resources into a nonfree package, so if nothing has changed in terms of licensing there may need to be a similar package if warranted.