European Association for Astronomy Education

Virtual Moon Atlas is a software developed by Patrick Chevalley and Christian Legrand that allows you to visualize the Moon at any date and hour and can also be used to drive computerized telescopes to explore the Moon surface. The authors have made the software free for amateur astronomers, lunar observers and students who wish to practice selenography. The “Virtual Moon Atlas” is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

A screenshot from Virtual Moon Atlas

This software is the result of a collaboration between Christian Legrand, a passioned lunar observer, and co-author of the guide “Discover the Moon” published in English by Cambridge University Press and also published in French, German and Spanish, with Patrick Chevalley, author of the freeware “Cartes du Ciel / Sky Charts”.

When the authors conceived the software they thought about something that could be easily used in astronomical observations, but also that could also be used at home to learn more about the Moon and its surface. It’s interfaced with Patrick Chevalley’s freeware “Sky Charts” which is also a good software to use with students.

This software can be used with students to study lunar formations just by clicking over a specific structure on the screen’s lunar surface. It has a very big database that was compiled by Christian Legrand where one can find more than 9000 entries and a pictures library that has more than 7000 images.

The software allows the inversion of the Moon’s image in N-S and E-W directions allowing to preview the exact image that is expected to be seen on the telescope.

A screenshot from the same view of the Moon on Virtual Moon Atlas but on a telescope with an inversion N-S.

It is possible to choose the language used by the software and database. To know more about the program follow the authors sugestion and read the complete manual or the quick user’s guide or to look at the screens copies to see what are the possibilities.

A fantastic software…

Links:
Virtual Moon Atlas webpage
Virtual Moon Atlas download
Virtual Moon Atlas translations of the software

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors because it is a free software planetarium, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It uses OpenGL to render a realistic sky in real time. With Stellarium, it’s possible to see what one cannot see with the naked eye, binoculars or a small telescope. This is a very nice tool to use with your students in classroom and in night-time observations preparation. One can see past, present and future events like eclipses, Venus and Mercury transits or even reproduce Galileo’s observations about Jupiter’s moons.

A screenshot of Stellarium

Stellarium is developed by the French programmer Fabien Chéreau, who launched the project in the summer of 2001. Other developers include Robert Spearman, Johannes Gajdosik, Matthew Gates, Nigel Kerr and Johan Meuris. John Meuris is responsible for most of the the artwork done with the constellations and landscapes.

Stellarium was featured on SourceForge in May 2006 as Project of the Month.

Links:

Stellarium webpage