Stellarium: A Stellar Planetarium for Your Mac

This weekend’s kickoff to the holiday sales season has been, for me at least, mostly disappointing. Apple’s best discount is slightly less than 10%, a deal you can get just about any time of the year from one online Apple retailer or another.

To tell you the truth, I can’t imagine standing in line for hours, just to get one of the “door buster” bargains on offer. So instead, I thought we would highlight our own Saturday Spectacular Software and introduce you to one of the best planetarium software packages for the Mac.

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium software program for the Mac. (Linux and Windows versions are also available.) You can use Stellarium to teach your kids (or yourself) more about the nighttime sky, or just to identify a particular bright object. I confess that I only use Stellarium as a simple planetarium, to learn which objects are viewable in the sky at a particular time, but it’s capable of much more. It can be used to drive real planetarium domes or computer-controlled telescopes.

Go ahead and give Stellarium a try. It’s free, and it’s our first Saturday Spectacular Software pick.