Tonight, I’ve been playing with Stellarium, a very cool planetarium program. It’s an open source program so it’s free and has a lot of features. I really like the view where you can have different culture’s constellations and asterisms portrayed on the stars. It has a night mode if you want to take your laptop out with you. It’s really fun to put the program in equatorial mode, zoom in on Jupiter, and speed up time. You can then watch the Jovian moons revolve around Jupiter, Jupiter revolve on it’s axis, and Jupiter slowly moving across the field of stars. If you do use it in the field, make sure to set your location and check that the time is current.

Free download for Linux, Mac, and Windows here. Special thanks to Small Dog Electronics that mentioned the software in their email newsletter.