Stellarium, in your browser. Explore the night sky from any device — no VNC client, no local install.
This runs the full Stellarium desktop planetarium inside a single container and streams it to your browser over Selkies (WebRTC), so panning the sky, zooming into a nebula and scrubbing through time stay smooth — the part of a real-time planetarium where the old noVNC containers feel laggy.

Table of Contents

1. What is this?
2. Why Selkies?
3. Install on Unraid
4. Configuration
5. First use
6. How it works
7. Credits

1. What is this?

An own-image container that packages Stellarium — the free, open-source desktop planetarium — on top of LinuxServer.io's baseimage-selkies and serves its desktop UI straight to your browser. No X client, no VNC viewer, no separate install on your workstation: open the WebUI and look up.

There is no maintained browser-desktop build of the actual Stellarium application — the only "in a browser" option is Stellarium Web, a separate and much lighter JavaScript reimplementation, not the full desktop program with its plugins, catalogues and sky cultures. This is a maintained, modern Selkies (WebRTC) build of the real thing for amd64 and arm64.

Stellarium itself is installed from Debian trixie's stellarium package, so it tracks Debian's security updates and works natively on both architectures.

2. Why Selkies?

A planetarium is a continuous-rendering workload: you drag across the sky, zoom into a star cluster, speed up time to watch the planets move, and swing the whole celestial sphere around. Over the older noVNC stack that constantly changing canvas feels laggy because the whole frame is re-encoded on every change. Selkies streams the desktop over WebRTC, the same reason LinuxServer moved Blender and FreeCAD onto it — so the sky stays fluid. When the host has a GPU the base wires it through; without one it falls back to software rendering (Mesa llvmpipe) so it still works.

3. Install on Unraid

Requires Unraid 6.12+. Install via Community Applications — search for Stellarium (look for the junkerderprovinz maintainer). Or add the template repository manually under Docker → Add Container → Template repositories:

https://github.com/junkerderprovinz/unraid-apps

Then open the WebUI on the mapped HTTPS port (default 3001).

4. Configuration

Stellarium's configuration, chosen location, downloaded star catalogues, landscapes, plugins and screenshots all persist under /config (in /config/.stellarium), so nothing is lost across image updates.

[!NOTE] The WebUI has no login by default for trusted-LAN use. Never expose it directly to the internet — put it behind a VPN or a reverse proxy that adds authentication, or set CUSTOM_USER + PASSWORD to enable the built-in basic auth.

5. First use

1. Open the WebUI — Stellarium starts maximised, showing the sky for its default location.
2. Set your location (press F6, or the location button in the left toolbar) so the sky matches where you are; it is remembered for next time.
3. Explore: drag to pan, scroll to zoom, use the bottom toolbar to toggle constellations, atmosphere, grids and labels, and the time controls (J / K / L) to slow, pause or speed up time.
4. Want more? Stellarium's Configuration window (F2) enables plugins — the telescope control, satellites, exoplanets, meteor showers and more.

Closing the Stellarium window simply reopens a fresh instance — it is the container's single app (kiosk model), so there is nothing else to manage.

6. How it works

Browser ──WebRTC (Selkies)──> Stellarium container
                              ├─ nginx (Selkies WebUI, HTTPS :3001)
                              ├─ openbox + Selkies desktop
                              └─ /usr/bin/stellarium  (Debian trixie package)
                                 └─ /config/.stellarium  (location, catalogues, plugins, persisted)

Built on ghcr.io/linuxserver/baseimage-selkies:debiantrixie. A small s6 overlay seeds the openbox autostart (which launches Stellarium as the session's single app), keeps the WebUI login-free unless you set credentials, and prints a STELLARIUM IS READY banner to the container log once the WebUI is serving. Images are built natively per architecture, boot-smoke tested (the binary is present and the WebUI answers) before publishing, and scanned for CVEs.

7. Credits

• Stellarium by the Stellarium developers (GPL-2.0) — the planetarium this image packages. Installed from the Debian stellarium package. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Stellarium project.
• LinuxServer.io baseimage-selkies (GPL-3.0) — the Selkies web-desktop base.
• Selkies — the WebRTC desktop streaming stack.

See NOTICE for the full bundled-software license list. This repository's own wrapper (Dockerfile, rootfs, scripts, artwork) is MIT — see LICENSE.

If this saved you a planetarium setup, consider buying me a coffee:

_{Part of a family of self-hosted Unraid apps + plugins by junkerderprovinz — see them all at github.com/junkerderprovinz, or install from Community Applications.}