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Top 11 C++ Astronomy Projects
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stellarium
Stellarium is a free GPL software which renders realistic skies in real time with OpenGL. It is available for Linux/Unix, Windows, macOS and Haiku. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.
Im not a LLM / vibe code hater (in fact a big user) but I wonder are these people just not looking for an existing solution or do they want their own bespoke version for access to some internals and to (kind of?) learn the high level of what goes into these projects.
If its the former, people are wasting their own time, money and energy when spending a similar amount of time searching vs prompting might yield better results for their use case. If its the latter, unless there is a killer feature, which I dont see in the github repo, why not point people to use the actively maintained project instead of the one the vibe coder is going to let die on the vine once they get bored. Its fracturing the space, for what gain? (no pun intended)
Also how much of this code is the LLM lifting from Stellarium either indirectly in the training data or actively searching for it to reference the code in its context?
https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium
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Project mention: Show HN: The whole Solar System and every tracked satellite, live in the browser | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-09-29
> and the download page looks like this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/
The page that states "Please do not download Celestia from this repository. This repository has been abandoned, and the new source and website are here and here, respectively." for the past four years ?
Try: https://celestiaproject.space/download.html and https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia for version 1.6.4
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OpenSpace
This is the official GitHub repository for OpenSpace: an open source astrovisualization project. For instructions on how to build and run OpenSpace, see the Getting Started Guides on the wiki page at http://docs.openspaceproject.com.
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DobsonianDSC
Simple low cost circuit to connect inexpensive optical encoders to a dobsonian telescope
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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SolarCalculator
Arduino library to calculate the times of sunrise, sunset, solar noon, twilight, the solar position, and more.
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ Astronomy discussion
C++ Astronomy related posts
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Show HN: The whole Solar System and every tracked satellite, live in the browser
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Celestia – real-time 3D visualization of space
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Show HN: The Atlas of Space
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Celestia – real-time 3D visualization of space
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The Planets Today
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ESASky
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Celestia – real-time 3D visualization of space
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A note from our sponsor - AppSignal
www.appsignal.com | 8 Oct 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Astronomy projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | stellarium | 10,028 |
| 2 | Celestia | 2,369 |
| 3 | OpenSpace | 1,262 |
| 4 | gdl | 313 |
| 5 | heyoka | 251 |
| 6 | SwiftAA | 213 |
| 7 | DobsonianDSC | 89 |
| 8 | CollimationCircles | 72 |
| 9 | SolarCalculator | 71 |
| 10 | fips3 | 32 |
| 11 | vif | 12 |
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