Best Free Astronomy Software:

Celestia 1.6.2.1

real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxies. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. review

Kstars 3.6.4

open source astronomical tool that provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes up to 100 million stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects,all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets, asteroids, supernovae, and satellites. review

PHD2 2.6.10

a telescope guiding software that simplifies the process of tracking a guide star, letting you concentrate on other aspects of deep-sky imaging or spectroscopy. review

Sky Charts 4.2.1

this program enables you to draw sky charts, making use of the data in 16 catalogs of stars and nebulae. In addition the position of planets, asteroids and comets are shown. review

Star Calc 5.73

Fast astronomy planetarium & star mapping program for Windows 95/98/NT. It illustrates star positions of any instance of the day observed from any geographic locations on the Earth. The star positions can be viewed and presented as images of semispherical whole sky or any of the user defined sub-areas. These images can be zoomed at different scales, rotated, screen-captured and printed. review

Stellarium 23.1

free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. review

Virtual Moon Atlas 8.2

astronomy freeware tool to visualize the appearance of the Moon for any date and time, to pilot telescopes with computerized mounts on the Moon and to study in detail the lunar formations using a database of over a million entries and a strong image library of almost 9000 photos. review

WinStars 3.0.283

complete planetarium, showing you the appearance of the sky, as seen from anywhere on Earth, for any date. review