Stellarium is a realistic looking, feature rich OpenSource planetarium. The default catalog has over one half million stars, but you can get an extended catalog with over 200 million stars. All the usual information you expect in a planetarium is available. For the most part, navigation of the image can be done easily with a mouse or using the keyboard. The software takes over the GUI (like some games do). It can project (via a projector, I assume) for use in an actual planetarium or be used on your computer screen. You can get plugins for artificial satellite tracks and to interface with your telescope (or at least, work with your telescope).
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Stellarium is really, really nice. However, I find the 10.3 version is crashes on my Dell laptop running Vista, while 10.2 was very stable on my Dell desktop running XP. YMMV. The 10.x scripting language is still undocumented, which is a major pain. Stellarium is flexible in that you can generate vistas from other worlds, and add new objects (such as comets) when they are discovered. I have a pile of addons and scripts (version 0.9 and 10.x) at astroblog which people may enjoy http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/search?q=stellarium plus a couple of bug notes.
You should run it on Linux.
Except then none of the hand-rolled astronomical imaging software and obscure webcam-made-into-astronomical camera software works (and life is too short to make dual boot systems)
Seriously? People are writing Window's specific software for amateur astronomy? You almost have to work to do that these days.
My kids love Stellarium too!
I wrote about it on Rational Moms here.
Yeah, not so much windows specific, but windows is what they have, so they write software/drivers that runs under that (sure, you can always run stuff under a windows emulator under *nix using something like Wine, that's how *nix folk run the windows based SkyMap pro (the program I use for serious astronomical observing, I generate all my spotters maps with it). Registax image stacking is windows only, the various camera controllers are windows only (I prefer Vega over the others, even though Vega is somewhat dated, there now is an Ubuntu image capture system, but its not good for all webcams or astronomical cameras).
And lets face it, most people use Windows and have no desire to replace it, so being aware of potential problems with a really cool planetarium program is fairly usefull. If you are a windows user and 10.3 consistently crashes on you, you can download 10.2 at http://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium/files/ its quite stable on fairly low end systems.
Chanson wrote at #4
And your other favourite, Celestia, is my other favourite too. I like visiting exoplanets in it. Celestia and Stellarium, free and fun.
I tried Stellarium some time back. I really liked the interface, but it used to crash for me, too, especially when I messed with the clock. Had to get rid of it. I use Celestia.
Well, you guys keep looking up into the sky. When the Aliens come they are going to compare the Linux users and the Windows users and pick which to eat and which to allow to live and serve as sysadmins for them.
Stellarium works well on Linux - I have used it on Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, and 9.10. I tried Celestia, but for reasons I no longer remember, I prefer Stellarium - it's been quite a while since I looked at Celestia, so maybe it time for a re-visit. One minor gripe about Stellarium - when you first start it is does not ask your location, so you end up somewhere near Paris unless you change it. Changing location is not difficult, but it is less intuitive than it could be (it would be even better if it grabbed location information from my computer).
All in all, Stellarium is great for learning the night sky. I especially like the "fast forward" option on time - it really shows how the positions of objects change during the night, and in relation to the horizons. Also great for showing how the planets move in relation to the "fixed stars."
#8 MikesPier Try version 10.2, it was very stable on my dodgy old computer, and should work fine on most others, it's worth the effort. Celestia is fantatsic, but not such a good program for working out what you can see tonight.