If you have a good video card, stellarium is good. Under Linux, i use kstars alot. It only goes down to mag 8 or so, which isn’t good enough to do field stars for some things – like finding Pluto. If you’re connected to the internet, kstars does alot of the linking out to internet sites for more info on objects. It was stunning when it came out, but didn’t the the press that Google sky got.

I also use Planetarium on my Palm Pilot. Stars to mag 10.5 (deeper if i had more memory). In my hand at night, very handy for answering the odd question like “how far away is Vega” should my memory lapse. I also use it to log observations when they happen.

I have brought a laptop out at night, armed with a knoppix boot-linux-from-CD, and cranked up kstars. But my palm screen doesn’t blind me (it has a wimpy backlight) and it’s not heavy enough to break my back.

I also use xephem, celestia, an NGC database, and sometimes i’ll use the AAVSO site to create field star maps for objects.

My Orion Dob’s computer can help. For example, i can look up at the sky, see that there’s a sucker hole in Hercules (perhaps after consulting Planetarium), ask my telescope for double stars there, and it points me to the first in a list of about 10. The hole moves to Cynus, and i ask it about globulars or galaxies there, etc.

But are you saying that you can put something up on Google Earth (sky) that your students can see?

That said, the price can’t be beat and as a stark, technical utility it’s great and sure to stir things up in the planetarium software space.

That being said, I have to agree with Pamela with regard to the Google Apps usefulness in education. You’re not going to get SNP or even Stellarium unless the interest is already there. If half the class has SNP and the other half has Stellarium then your teaching is made more difficult because you spend more time dealing with user interface differences than astronomy. With a publically known app such as Google Sky everyone in a class can get it, you deal with user interface issues once, and then concentrate on the proper class content.

And then the more intersted and committed people can go to SNP, etc.

Not only that, but being free, it’ll introduce lots of folks in light polluted cities to the wonders of the sky that they’re missing. Maybe they’ll -DO- something about all the light pollution when they see what’s at stake. Hope so.
Rich

One of the things that’s nice is that Stellarium can run on your laptop in “red night vision mode”. It’s not just a planetarium program, it’s kind of like having an on line Uranometria.

As a pure planetarium program, I think that there are other things out there that are better (both paid like SNP, or free like Stellarium), but the ability to do neat things with the KML layers is really what is going to be unique about Google Sky.

Of course it -does- cost money, but it’s not thousands of bucks or anything. I think I spent $120 a few years ago for mine (V4.5).
I just think you’d find it a user friendly program is all, and BTW I’m in no way connected to Space Holdings or Imaginova or anything, I’m just a satisfied user. I have not upgraded to the version that has star images (from the Sloan if I recall correctly) instead of graphics, because that version IS slower and would take up more room on my Mac laptop.
Richard B. Drumm
VP, CAS

I think this is a good app, but if I need to figure out something special I’ll fire up Starry Night, The Sky, or Celestia.

But again, for those just starting, it’s great. Like I said on my club’s blog…

“So go ahead. Download Google Earth, and start exploring space. And once you do that, go out and see what the real stars look like (which we do at our observatory).”