Stellarium - Highly recommended beautifully realistic view of the night sky from anywhere on Earth
XEphem - Professional quality planetarium & ephemerides software from the Clear Sky Institute, (largely for MAC & unix, but can be made to work for free on a PC using something like Cygwin)
Sky View Café - Sky View Café is both a website, and a downloadable piece of software. The website is free to use and uses a Java applet to display the view of the sky over any location on Earth
Sky Globe - Simplistic planetarium software that's easy to use. Originally shareware from KlassM Software Inc., generally available from many internet sites if this link is broken
Celestia - Fly through the visible universe, download plug-ins of all the latest space imagery, including the planets of our own solar system, exoplanets (those of other solar systems) and even black holes!
Celestia Motherlode - Download site for the greatest plug-ins/add-ons to make the most of Celestia
Where is M13? - A unique application that helps you visualize the locations and physical properties of deep sky objects in and around our own Galaxy
World Wide Telescope - Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based professional telescope projects
Virtual Moon Atlas - Explore all of the features of the Moon, from moutains, to rills and the mare (lava plains)
Google Sky - Shows the visible universe using a mosaic of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope. Also allows microwave and infra-red views and some historical information.
Google Moon - Discover the secrets of our nearest neighbour in space, learn about it's features and the spacecraft that have visited
Google Earth - Explore our own planet (including under the oceans & seas) in fabulous detail
K3CCDTools Lite - Image capture software for all varieties of WebCam. The Lite version is free, although you need to periodically downlaod a security key to keep using it
Registax - Image processing software that, among other things, allows the stacking of frames from a WebCam movie
Deep Sky Stacker - Excellent software for stacking digital images to get crisp & fabulous results. Stacking software allows you to take shorter individual exposures but superimpose them to get a better overall result
Iris - Iris is both image viewing and processing software. It is not easy for a beginner to use, but is very useful for users of all abilities to view FITS files and convert them to other formats
The GIMP - The GIMP is comprehensive and powerful image processing software. From the website you will need at least the first two downloads and will need to install the GTK+2 Runtime Environment first
FITS Liberator - Developed by NASA, ESO & ESA this is a plugin for Photoshop Elements and Photoshop that allows it to import FITS files and manipulate professional telescope images
Heavens Above - Guide to just about everything in the sky (including whole sky chart). If you don't live in the Stockton-on-Tees area follow the on-screen instructions to change your location
Mappe Bolam - Static and movie images for a forecast of all kinds of weather parameters (including jetstream which affects astronomical “seeing” upto 72 hours in advance
Meteo Blue - similar to Mappe Bolam above, but with a seperate data source and more detailed graphics (if both agree then it's usually a fairly accurate forecast)
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