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Explore the Night Sky With Stellarium
You may have heard of Celestia, a great program that lets you leave planet Earth and explore space from beyond. Stellarium is similar to Celestia in some ways, but it allows you to view and explore the night sky exactly as it would appear from any location on Earth. Like Celestia, it is also available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
When you first launch Stellarium, you'll find that you are looking at the sky as it appears in Paris, France. If you are located in Paris, then you're all set. However, chances are that you are not. Fortunately, changing your location is easy.
You can either press the Location window button in the menu bar on the left side of the screen, or press the F6 key. You'll then see the location window. You can select your location in a few different ways.
Once in the location window, you can select your location by clicking on the map, searching for your location, or entering your location co-ordinates. If you have a decimal latitude/longitude for your location, you will have to convert your location to degrees, minutes, and seconds. If you have entered your exact co-ordinates, select a name for your location and click the Add to list button. You may also want to click the Use as default checkbox.
If you're using this during the day, you'll probably want to advance the time of day to nighttime. There are buttons to navigate through time on the right side of the bottom navigation bar. Just click the Increase time speed button (or press L on your keyboard) a few times to get things moving. Then click the Set normal time rate button (or press K on your keyboard).
Another way to move through time is to jump to a particular date and time rather than fast forwarding or rewinding. Click the Date/time window
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