Star light, Star bright

Here's another completely free open source program I found recently that's plain cool.  It's called Stellarium.  It's great for learning about stars and planets with kids (or just by yourself).  You can select your location (anywhere in the world) and time, zoom in and out, fast forward and backwards in time, and a whole bunch more - it's extremely realistic looking too.  Yesterday Sadie was working on a project for school that required making observations of the moon.  However, due to the cloudy skys and the many trees in around our house we couldn't see the moon just then.  I fired up Stellarium and chose our location on the map.  It took us to a nighttime view of the sky over our house with everything labeled - it even had the moon in it's correct phase.  We started with the moon but soon Sadie and Mason were asking to see all the rest of the planets.  We learned a few names of some of the moons of Jupiter, saw the rings of Saturn, and even found the former planet Pluto  (I think it's called a plutoid now or something).  It will label and outline all the constellations as well.  Click on any star or planet and it will tell you its name along with some more technical info.

I haven't done this yet but one of the things you can do is change the way the "sky" is shown on the screen so that it can look like it would if you were outside looking straight up.  Take your laptop, hook it up to a digital projector then point the projector up at the ceiling and ... - Boom! - instant homemade planetarium!

-Chris