Stellarium: A (free) planetarium on your PC

Stellarium might just be the thing that gets me back out into the cold evenings to look a the night sky. I used to have a program like this, called SkyGlobe, back in the day, but this is an amazing upgrade.

My son is always asking me about this star or that and I am often at a loss to tell him. Now I can fire up the laptop again and give him some correct answers and explore the planets and stars better than ever before.

Also, exposing one of the joys of the Open Software movement, there are versions of Stellarium available for almost any operating system including Windows, Mac and Linux. Yea!

Download of the Day: Stellarium
Cross-platform open source program Stellarium brings the sky to your computer's monitor, letting you know exactly what you're seeing in the night sky.

Stellarium is an open source desktop planetarium for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. It renders the skies in realtime using OpenGL, which means the skies will look exactly like what you see with your eyes, binoculars, or a small telescope. Stellarium is very simple to use, which is one of its biggest advantages: it can easily be used by beginners.

Stellarium Astronomy Software [Sourceforge]

(Via Lifehacker.)

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