Many years ago, I used to sit on the roof of our rural house with a book on constellations and a red-lensed flashlight. I became familiar with the groups of stars that were named by our ancestors, and soon became able to recognize the obvious pones, like Orion, and the more obscure ones, like Draco.
It was humbling to sit under that night sky and see those thousands of stars.
Unfortunately, I live in town now, and can no longer see dim stars from my home. But when i get out in the middle of nowhere, I still delight in viewing the heavens and trying to remember where the various constellations are.
Today’s FamilyFirst pick allows you to recreate the heavens on your own computer. It’s called Stellarium.
Here’s their mission:
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.
That’s right, it’s free. And it runs on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux!
This amazing program will fill your screen with the sky. Maneuvering around is as simple as grabbing the screen and moving it with a left mouse click. You can scroll in and out with your mouse wheel.
This amazing package will fascinate any of you with a yearning for the stars for many hours. Enjoy.
http://www.stellarium.org/
