OStatic

Four Astronomy Apps to Help You Watch the Skies

If the recent series of space shuttle missions has piqued or renewed your interest in space, you'll need some astronomy software to help you navigate the skies from your backyard. There are several terrific open source applications available for users of all levels of experience, from casual and novice users to astronomy buffs with a secret desire to become an astronaut.

Here are my four favorite apps to help you find your way around the skies and stars:

Stellarium - With its realistic 3D images of planets, stars, and the entire Milky Way it's hard to beat this app's "wow" factor. Eye candy aside, Stellarium is a powerful learning and teaching tool that contains catalogs of up to 210 million stars. It's approachable enough for home use, but robust enough to be used in planetariums and domed facilities.

Nightfall - This app is for the closet astrophysicist. It creates "animated views of eclipsing binary stars, calculates synthetic light curves and radial velocity curves, and eventually determines the best-fit model for a given set of observational data of an eclipsing binary star system." In other words, it's great for things like measuring the mass of stars. If you just want to find Orion's Belt in the night sky, try one of the other apps.

KStars - Here's an app that puts a planetarium right on the KDE desktop. Enter any geographical coordinate on Earth and KStars will tell you what you'll see if you look up. It's also got nifty tools to keep you up-to-date on what's happening in the sky above you each night and a calendar so you plan ahead (perfect if you want to see the International Space Station fly overhead).

Celestia - If you're looking for an app to use with kids, this is a terrific option. It will help you check out all kinds of galaxies, comets, asteroids and moons, with easy-to-understand navigation commands. Children and students are particularly captivated by Celestia because it allows users to travel through space and examine objects closeup rather than while standing on a virtual Earth.

 

• astronomy
• stellarium
• celestia
• kstars
• space
• stars
• Nightfall

Share Your Comments