Happy New Year to you and yours! And what better way to mark the holiday than to ponder time, space, the universe, our seemingly inconsequential lives within it all.... and use some really cool planetarium software to display the stars. Nightshade is a new free open source program from Digitalis Education Solutions, which renders over 100,000 stars and provides all kinds of other cool images of deep space, the surface of Mars, pictures from the Hubble telescope and the like. Users can explore by tracing orbits and trails or see the outlines of constellations from a variety of cultures. I imagine this making a really engaging presentation in combination with a projector/interactive whiteboard and the lights out. And it's free!
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