In case people were wondering I'm a physics/maths/astronomy student at Monash University and being a student I don't have a lot of money to spend on software for the PC. Luckily in my astronomy lab classes we're using a free application called Stellarium.

It's a reasonably good app giving you the ability to track stars all from the desk of your computer. This is an entirely free and open source application available to anyone with an interest in the night sky.

The interface is pretty simple with the ability to add/remove the atmosphere for a good view of the stars and the ability to turn different objects on and off. After selecting an object you can view details about that object. It will tell you all the information about the star an amateur astronomer would ever need. If you want to watch the object travel through the sky you can do so by using the simple date/time window that you can select and change the year, month, day, hours, minutes and seconds to view the object at any particular time you need.

It has the ability for you to change your location to anywhere in the world if you know the latitude and longitude. You can add the ecliptic line and the "Celestial Sphere" lines.

Stellarium is extendable to an extent. There are some plugins for it but not as many as other astronomy software.

The problem with Stellarium like most graphic intense software is that speed that the app runs at. As you can see I was only getting 2.27 fps and thats using my laptop and on Windows 7. I have run it on Fedora at uni and it is significantly slower on that. I have heard rumours that it does run faster on Macs and Ubuntu.

I'd recommend this program to all amateur astronomers and people who don't have access to a telescope. It's a very good program to view the stars without having to leave the comfort of your own home.