I hadn’t been actively working the program at all — I just let my five and seven year old kids figure it out on their own and show me what it could do. Mostly they like to orient the view striaght down (so the ground is a circle surrnounded by sky, as in the screenshot ) or orient it straight up (so the sky is a circle surrounded by ground ). But my husband is thinking of getting them a telescope for Christmas, at which point we’ll probably get some real use out of the program to find items to look for in the sky.

Jim — Thanks, I’ll take a look! From the telescope videos, Nico has learned about viewing things outside the visible spectrum, so he’d probably like those videos.

Chaplain — Thanks! Nico is so funny with his screenshots. He’s constantly filling his hard drive with screenshots from all the films he watches and from software like these. As I said, I started taking screenshots of films myself when I was doing film reviews for some of the other blogs I write for, and the kids thought it was cool and wanted to do it too!

Which, made me think of this.
Cool things to do with Stellarium (version 0.10):

Bring up the date and time window (F5).
Modify the time to be noon or so.
Make sure you can see the sun. (Click with mouse and drag.)
Now, advance the day, click by click.
Watch the sun (and stars) move to a slightly new spot each day.

Here’s another.
Turn off ground [G], cardinal points [Q] and atmosphere [A]
Change your location [F6] to the moon
Find object [control-F] and enter Earth
Click on screen and drag the Earth to the middle of the screen
Speed up time [L] about 4 or 5 times