StarPlot: Links

Stellar Astronomy Links

Your Sky is an interactive Web-based planetarium.
Stellarium is very realistic software to simulate a planetarium. (Note, it is not related to the 3D model company of the same name mentioned below.)
The FAQ of the sci.astro newsgroup includes a section about stars.
Look up stars (mostly nearby) in an online database at the Internet Stellar Database.
More stars are described in the Star of the Week page.
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia lists about 100 stars about which planets may have been detected.
This Atlas of the Universe by Richard Powell has a set of concentric 3-D maps of the cosmos, as well as additional information about the content of the maps. (These maps can be reproduced to some extent in StarPlot using the Gliese and Sky2000 star catalogs. Be sure to use Galactic coordinates.)
The company Stellarium creates custom star maps in true 3D (i.e., models) for museums, planetaria, etc. (Note, the company has no relation to the Stellarium software mentioned above.) I've seen the stellarium at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland in person, and it is gorgeous.
Many, many other links are available via the links page of Winchell Chung's 3-D StarMaps site, a vast and exhaustive collection of 3-D star map resources.

Other 3-D Star Mapping Programs

Here are a few other 3-D star mapping programs you can obtain for Linux:

Partiview by Peter Teuben is a very professional looking piece of software that uses Mesa.
Starmap by Ove Kåven requires the wxWindows graphics library.
SpaceChart by Miguel Coca depends upon GNOME.
Celestia, while not exactly mapping software, is an amazing 3-D universe simulator program, including everything from the Solar System to distant galaxies.

Finally, there are also a large number of other star mapping programs listed by Winchell Chung. Some are open source, some are free but proprietary, and some are shareware.

About the Author

My personal home page is here (it may disappear at any time, as I am no longer affiliated with Princeton University), and here is my GPG public key (key ID 4F83C751). Also available from the MIT public keyserver and others. I am also a Debian Developer.

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