Astroguesser

My officemate, on hearing that he missed the eclipse this morning, mentioned a “Virtual Planetarium” called Stellarium, which is quite good. It even allows views from other planets. The stock background is rather amusing when the location is the South Pole (he suggested to the authors that they take some images from IceCube): trees and houses. You can pick a date, or do a Time Traveler scene with the months whipping by too.

We decided that a world with only Geoguesser is incomplete. What we need is a 3-D version, using the stars in our local area. If you need help, you can cheat by asking for the constellation lines to be drawn. When Orion looks like scrambled eggs, where in space are you? He suggested the name.

I’m not quite sure how the user picks a location in a sphere, though...