You can’t see many stars in London, but on a clear night you can see a few and it drives me mad not knowing what some of the brighter stars and planets are.
So I was thrilled to find Stellarium. It’s a great bit of astronomy software that’s free, open-source and cross-platform. And I love software that’s free and cross-platform.
Enter your latitude and longitude and it’ll draw beautiful real-time maps of the sky where you are. You can speed it up and watch the stars race past and the sun shoot up. You can turn the ground or the atmosphere on or off. Click on a star and it’ll tell you its name.
I’ll be taking this to Cornwall later in the year and making sure that I have the latitude and longitude of my favourite spot plumbed in – then I can stare up at the zillions of stars in the Milky Way and have a chance of figuring out what some of them are called.
Just need to find something to do satellite predictions now… it’s got to be out there.
Just downloaded this – what a great find!