All Other: KStars by KDE

4.0 A nice Planetarium program for Linux!

Simple to use; Intuitive; Educational

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If you're looking for a good planetarium program that runs under Linux or Free BSD, then KStars may be what you are looking for.

KStars is a graphical desktop planetarium designed for the KDE desktop. It provides an accurate simulation of the night sky that includes thing such as stars, constellations, star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, all of the planets, the Sun, the Moon, comets and asteroids. KStars is part of the KDE Edutainment Project and is FREE. It comes bundled in the KDE environmnet on a number of Linux distributions, or you can download it.

You can set your location to any place on the Earth, and set the date to any date you choose, forwards or backwards! Many program features are included and the display can be panned and zoomed with the mouse.

The interface is intuitive and allows you to identify objects and track their motion across the sky. The display includes 130,000 stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects, all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets and asteroids. Using Indi drivers, you can control your telescope through the software.

It may not be as fancy as some planetarium programs that cost hundreds of dollars, but it does a job, does it quite well, and looks good doing it! And it's one of the best on the linux platform!

KStars is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 2.