Stellarium | Explore your Universe
March 2, 2008 – 4:40 pm
I guess when you as kid you will wondering why the star and the moon is so beautiful, and you will ask your dad why Moon will follow us wherever we go, 
and sometime we show our hand to sky and point to 1 of the brightest star and wondering how its can shine too brightly and you have ask your father to buy 1 telescope to you when you see and ads regarding NASA or Astronaut.
So here is the easy way for millenium kid to explore the universe from PC, i introduce to you Stellarium. Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.
a few features of this software
sky
* default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
* extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
* asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
* constellations for ten different cultures
* images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
* realistic Milky Way
* very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
* the planets and their satellites
interface
* a powerful zoom
* time control
* multilingual interface
* scripting to record and play your own shows
* fisheye projection for planetarium domes
* spheric mirror projection for your own dome
* graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
* telescope control
visualisation
* equatorial and azimuthal grids
* star twinkling
* shooting stars
* eclipse simulation
* skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection
customisability
* add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts…
And dont forget its Free
Source : Stellarium
Tags: 3D, Google Earth, Moon, Planetarium, Sky, Star, Stellarium