Carina
Carina
Carina is an open-source planetarium for people who observe the sky from their backyard. It shows the real sky for your place and time and turns it into an observing plan: what to look at tonight, at what time, with which instrument, and how to find each object.
In development. The current version is 0.19.1. Carina is already fully usable for observing, and its astronomical calculations have been validated against official ephemerides, but there is no stable release (1.0) yet: the interface and file formats may change between versions. It has been tested mainly on Windows 11.
What Carina does
A planetarium shows the sky. Carina also plans your night.
- Realistic sky: 860,000 stars, a photographic Milky Way, atmosphere, refraction and light pollution simulation (Bortle 1 to 9).
- Deep sky: 18,632 objects from 11 catalogs, with Portuguese names and 1,179 real DSS survey images built into the program.
- Planets and Moon: a window for each planet with the best season in your sky; moons of Jupiter and Saturn; a lunar globe with relief and libration.
- Sky calendar and eclipses: the month’s events for your location, with reminders and .ics export.
- Tonight: the night, the Moon, the dark hours and the best targets for your sky, each with an explained score from 0 to 100.
- Planning: observing lists with rise, culmination and set times for each target, and the horizon of your backyard drawn by you.
- Astrophotography: the night’s session, suggested exposure, yearly imageability, saved setups and mosaics.
- In the field: PDF field charts, a red night mode and a phone companion opened by QR code.
- ISS and satellites: visible passes from imported orbital elements, with the track drawn on the sky.
Open source
Carina’s code is open (MIT license) and lives on GitHub. It relies on public astronomy data, all with attribution; the full list of sources and licenses is in the project repository.
Soon this section will have user manuals and articles on how to use Carina to plan your observing nights.