What home astronomy/planetarium program(s) do you use?

[Keatah]

I just discovered Stellarium, and it seems to work nicely.
There is also:
Celestia
Starry Night
TheSky
Redshift
Dance of the Planets
Universe Sandbox
You can see the links to those here in the "See also" section --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarium_(computer_program)
I was surprised to find that TheSkySix is distributed on a 200GB hard disk with complete catalogs!! It's that BIG!! Even my baddest and raunchiest Orbiter install is nowhere near that!! Good God!!

 

[IgnoreThisBarrel]

Celestia and Universe Sandbox.

 

[tblaxland]

In order of decreasing use:

• Stellarium
• Heavens-Above.com
• Celestia

 

[JEL]

I just discovered Stellarium, and it seems to work nicely.

I second that

 

[ghostrunner01]

I love Stellarium, its much better than many paid planetarium programs. I also love to use Universe Sandbox 2. Its so much fun to shoot a star through the Solar System and screw up all the orbits and watch the planets collide. :chainsaw:

 

[Keatah]

I'm going through stellarium pretty thoroughly and looking for bugs, If anyone wants me to investigate and report anything, just pm me.

 

[astrosammy]

Stellarium is a great help. I even created a panorama of my garden for it. I once used Celestia until I got Windows 7 (blame my old GPU), but now, with my new notebook it might work much better, still have to try it.

 

[Quick_Nick]

I used Universe Sandbox while it was free.
And I love Stellarium, I make use of Heavens-Above for watching satellites, and I've never tried Celestia.

 

[RisingFury]

I'm going through stellarium pretty thoroughly and looking for bugs, If anyone wants me to investigate and report anything, just pm me.

On two computers I experience the effect where, if I don't touch the mouse or keys for a few seconds, the frame rate drops to around 15 FPS. I can't seem to turn this effect off. Is there a setting anywhere? Do you get the same slowdown?

 

[garyw]

In order of decreasing use:

• Stellarium
• Heavens-Above.com
• Celestia

What he said! I use Heavens-above for ISS fly overs and flares, Stellarium for planetary positions/stars and Celestia for general messing around.

 

[Ripley]

Yes, Stellarium!!

 

[IgnoreThisBarrel]

I never really got into Stellarium; Celestia has spoiled me.

 

[JEL]

On two computers I experience the effect where, if I don't touch the mouse or keys for a few seconds, the frame rate drops to around 15 FPS. I can't seem to turn this effect off. Is there a setting anywhere? Do you get the same slowdown?

I removed my initial answer in this post as it was wrong.
See Keatah's response on page 2.

 

[jedimaster1214]

i made the immediate area around my house into a surface base, and use orbiter, so i know what would be outside right now (weather permitting), and which direction to look.(i.e. not satellites) it's VErY accurate.

 

[ex-orbinaut]

Quite a while back now used to use;
Ad Astra FreeStar.

Nowadays;
Stallarium,
StarPlot,
GPredict.

 

[Keatah]

On two computers I experience the effect where, if I don't touch the mouse or keys for a few seconds, the frame rate drops to around 15 FPS. I can't seem to turn this effect off. Is there a setting anywhere? Do you get the same slowdown?

Stellarium is purposely dropping the framerate to conserve laptop battery power. There is a minimum setting and maximum setting you can change in the config.ini file.

My config.ini file is located in -- C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Stellarium

And under the [video] section you can change these default settings to something else.
minimum_fps = 15
maximum_fps = 10000

 

[tblaxland]

I never really got into Stellarium; Celestia has spoiled me.

Horses for courses, IMHO. Stellarium is much better for ground based observations. I do like Celestia's eclipse predictions/visualisations though :thumbup:

 

[Wombat]

I use C2A, main program is 36Mb but can be added to with about 1Gb of extras.

http://astrosurf.com/c2a/english/download.htm#Catalogs

 

[Messierhunter]

Hard to say which I use most, different programs for different tasks. The most important ones for my observations are these though:
Satellite Tracker:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/satellitetracker/
Cartes du Ciel:
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/start
Astrometry.net:
http://www.astrometry.net/
And of course, Celestia and Stellarium.

 

[diogom]

Heavens-Above, and Stellarium.