I want to start advocating for the use of more opensource software. There is a whole philosophy with a lot of programmers that software should be freely distributed, many of them work incredibly hard to put together packages that anyone can use for free. Then there are a few developments that stand out far above the rest.
Tonight I want to tell you about stellarium. This is a planetarium software that shows you anything you want and more about the night sky. You can fast forward or go back in time, or go to any location and see what the night sky looks like. This is absolutely fantastic for anyone with kids or anyone who just wants to get familiar with the night sky. Panning is as easy as dragging, it shows constellations, planets, and has a huge library of objects in the sky along with information and sometimes images of that object. It is incredibly easy to use and is available for windows, mac, and linux. Go check it out.
