Having wondered for the past few weeks what that bright star was to the south west of my house I was intrigued by the mention of Stellarium on MakeUseOf today.

This app can display stars, constellations, planets, nebulas rendering 3D photo-realistic skies in real time.

It downloaded and installed quickly and I found it quite easy to use and configure. I entered my location and city in the Location settings and then found myself with a 3D view of the night sky in my area. Panning around is easy in a manner similar to Google Earth and constellation lines can be displayed by toggling this on from the left hand side menu.

And even better, it’s open source and can be downloaded here.