Comment 10 for bug 1291005

Can confirm. Vesta and Ceres in Stellarium are about 2 days behind their position in the sky as I found them last night.

I don't think it is fair to have an emotional response in blaming a software program for being inaccurate. As with any non-life-critical software, there is no implied warranty for any particular purpose. I personally have been consistently pleasantly surprised at how good and accurate Stellarium has been at simulating the sky, as I tried to not have a prior expectation of a level of performance. I approached all prediction results with a degree of skepticism. And everything has been perfect.

However, the first time I tried I couldn't find Vesta. When I tried a second night, I carefully star-hopped until I was definitely sure I found the right spot in the sky and Vesta wasn't there. With some searching I did find it nearby, a star that shouldn't be there, among the other stars. Incidentally that was the position where Vesta would be two days in the future according to Stellarium. By checking its two-day future location, I found Ceres as well. In a way this has been an adventure, an opportunity for me personally to recreate the experience of the original discoverers. I am not emotionally upset at having been misinformed.

To the extent that dwarf planets are important bright sky objects though, their inaccurate position is still a bug and should be fixed. Either by updating the Stellarium distribution with newer orbital data, or by making the orbital perturbations calculations apply to them as well.