This is just a short post about an interesting piece of software I recently found: Stellarium (http://www.stellarium.org/).
I have not tried it in depth yet but it sounds promising – have a look at the feature list from the homepage:
in version 0.10.2
sky
- default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
- extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
- asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
- constellations for twelve 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
- fisheye projection for planetarium domes
- spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome
- all new 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…
The software is open source and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux – if you have experience with this program, please drop a comment down here on this site…
I don’t have experience with the software but it looks amazing! I’m interested in things to do with solar systems so I’ll be looking at downloading the software.