stellarium VS Celestia

They're the Plieades. For future reference you can check on what's in the sky with software like Stellarium.

Btw, seems it is gone because the account was deleted https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/discussions/3277 back in June of 2019

We have been experiencing distress and perplexity of nations upon the earth unlike anything in modern history. There have been record hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and flooding globally which appears to relate to “the sea and the waves roaring” and according to research using the Stellarium Astronomy Software, this was a one time alignment on September 23, 2017 involving the sun, moon, and stars that accurately matches the reading of Revelation 12:1-2 word-for-word, the last book of the Bible foretelling the end of the age.

Stellarium - Planning out targets and just seeing what's up in the sky on any given night

I did a bit of poking around using Stellarium and found two stars that I thought were admirable candidates, and I wasn't sure why Nell and Ruggles didn't think so: Phecta and Megrez, Gamma and Delta Ursae Majoris. These are the two stars that make the left side of the 'scoop' of the big dipper. According to Stellarium they were at their closest to being in a north-south alignment in the year -2586, that is 2587 BCE, with right ascensions differing by just 1.28 s (0.00036°). They were 15° and 20° from the pole at the time.

But if you need an API i think stellarium.org has an one.

If I wanted to build an app like Stellarium, displaying a 3D model, but not requiring fast animation, not a game, more visualization, what libraries should I be considering for the display/UI portion of this program?

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.