I love the night sky. I used to spend hours gazing up at the stars, wondering what all was out there beyond what I could see, what brought it all about and just in awe at the majestic beauty of the night sky. I would stay up all night to see a meteor shower or a planet, and spent a good deal of the daylight hours reading books about astronomy.Now we have our very own planetarium on our computer, thanks to stellarium. From their website:
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.You can set the coordinates for your town (or somewhere you are visiting), select the time of day you wish to view and even set the speed of the passage of time so you can watch the stars as they rise and set. There are several interesting features which allow you to see the sky as it appears, with lines for the constellations, labels for astronomical features or even with constellation artwork. We have been enjoying just playing around with the features, but I am looking forward to our first formal unit on astronomy even more now.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.
While you are enjoying the night sky from your desktop, another good site is The Night Sky This Week which, as the name implies, lets you know of all the objects of interest in the night sky for the week.
Related Tags: homeschooling, science, reviews, astronomy, planetarium, stellarium
