Viewing the Night Sky with Linux, Part III: Stellarium and Celestia Take You There

There's a new version of Stellarium which was released just yesterday :-)

I should start by saying that overall, KStars is my personal favorite astronomy program. I think Stellarium is pretty, but somewhat weak in functionality (like limited catalogs and lack of ability to drive a goto telescope). XEphem is powerful, but has a kind of klunky user interface -- not just not pretty, its kind of awkward to use. Celestia is cool, but not really a direct competitor to the others for most astronomy use.

However, another program that is worth mentioning is Cartes du Ciel a.k.a. Skychart...

http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/start http://sourceforge.net/projects/skychart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartes_du_Ciel

In my opinion it falls somewhere between KStars and XEphem...