In the following video Middle school science team member Jim gives you a quick tour of Stellarium, a software planetarium, and highlights just a few of its features.
Stellarium is a free download for either the PC or Mac (http://www.stellarium.org/), and mobile versions are even available.
To support your classroom use of Stellarium, staff artist Reneé has designed a Quick Key page to keep near the computer and a set of Stellarium Challenges for you and your students to chew on. Both are available as free downloads. Here are the links.
Thanks go to Jesse for setting up the screen-capture software used to make what happens on the computer screen visible and large enough to view.
In the next video in this series, Jim will show you how Stellarium can easily be configured to show the top-down view of our solar system. This is the view most familiar to students and the view that lets us compare the relative motions of the planets.