Stellarium ROCKS!

I really don't know much about the project - but I do know that I downloaded the Stellarium software and within minutes I was blown away by the ease in which I was able to navigate through the sky!

The Stellarium download is pretty quick and doesn't take up a whole lot of room on your hard drive. You will NOT get a better return on your investment of 5 minutes for the download, I guarantee it!

After it installs, which it did without a hitch, I opened it up and was immediately stunned by the beautiful landscape (That looked pretty real!) that was before me. Since it was morning and the program runs on real time - I sped up the clock to make it night.

After fiddling around with all the buttons on the lower left side of the screen I was able to see all the constellations, in several different modes, with a flick of the mouse!

Take a look at these screenshots:

This picture shows the daytime sky with an artistic constellation overlay. Only the brightest stars/planets are visible due to the sunlight.

This picture shows the nighttime sky with the artistic constellation overlay.

This picture shows the night sky with the basic constellation representations

As you may have noticed, the Stellarium software looks very much like the sky map you just downloaded!

So this is my pic for best educational software of the year - if only Galileo could see us now....DOWNLOAD STELLARIUM FOR FREE!

If your computer is complaining about...one...more...thing...to...download, well then here is an online planetarium for you to use!

On to Astronomy Activities and Lesson Plans....