Where on the web can I find a good Astronomy program that maps star positions?

I need to complete some questions for my astronomy class. I need a solid, free program, without spyware.

thanks a ton.

Where on the web can I find a good Astronomy program that maps star positions?virus protection software

You're going to need coordinates for the area of the sky, in right ascention and declination.

You can start with the Digitized Sky Survey here:

http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_for...

It will give you a picture (be sure to change the file format from FITS to GIF) of that region of the sky.

You can get the coordinates of all the stars and their magnitudes from the USNO catalog here:

http://www.nofs.navy.mil/data/fchpix/

You can find other info about individual stars on SIMBAD:

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/

And if you want to combine them all, download a copy of DS9 from the SAO/Harvard website. Just google ds9, the link isn't working right now.

It's a free program that will download the images and catalogs for you for a region of the sky. It's put out by the Harvard astronomy dept. These are the tools astronomers use every day.

Where on the web can I find a good Astronomy program that maps star positions?adware

Cartes Du Ciel is probably the most complete and accurate of the free programs, though I'm partial to Starry Night myself, though it's not free: