I love astronomy. Every night, while camping, we’d sit around the campfire with my dad and he’d point out the stars and constellations. It was always a lot of fun. That’s why when someone sent me the link to this program I had to give it a try and I must say, I’m very impressed.
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. You simply feed in your location and it shows you what you’re seeing in the night sky. What’s really cool is along with the standard locations like Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas there is a Yosemite location: Ahwahnee. You can pick your location by either entering your Latitude and Longitude or by just mousing over points on the map until you find the one you want.
What a great way to brush up on your astronomy before heading up to the park.
Stellarium works with Windows, OS X and Linux. It’s open source so it’s free but if you like it you should donate something to the author.