Celestia VS celestia-gaia-stardb

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.

https://github.com/ajtribick/celestia-gaia-stardb/releases (scroll down to release 1.0.4 and download the zip file, then extract it into Celestia's data folder, likely located at C:\Program Files\Celestia\data, and replace the old saoindex.dat, hdindex.dat, and stars.dat files with the updated DR2 ones. if there is a folder inside the data folder, from extracting the zip file, then delete it, and the other files that were in the zip, or else Celestia might not work)